Outcomes for Teachers and Students in the ICT PD School Clusters Programme 2006-2008 - A National Overview

Methodology

Research Questions

The brief for the research on the 2006-8 cohort of ICT PD clusters was to provide a broad national profile of the impact of the programme across the country as a whole. It has not been our role to evaluate specific clusters or their particular PD models. To this end, the core research question being addressed is not so much to identify which particular models of PD are most effective, but rather to conduct a survey-based study to evaluate how well, and in what respects, the national ICT PD School Cluster initiative has been meeting the objectives of stakeholders and participants across the cohort. In doing this we addressed the following core research question:

How effective overall was the 2006-8 ICT PD programme in meeting its goals of:

• increasing teachers’ ICT skills, confidence and knowledge related to the educational applications of ICTs, and
• promoting quality classroom learning experiences for students?

Research Strategy and Data Collection

Survey data were gathered from all 39 of the 2006-8 cohort clusters. These comprised responses from a post-programme (End of Project) survey of participants. In order to maximise validity of comparison across cohorts, the End of Project instrument was based on equivalent questionnaires developed for the previous cohorts in the programme and reported separately in previous reports to the Ministry. Thus, this report focusses on the effects of the programme evidenced through retrospective self-report data gathered in the End of Project survey in September 2008.

Respondent Demographics

In all, 2674 valid End of Project survey responses were received from teachers in the 39 cohort clusters. This represents an estimated response rate of c.70% for the End of Project survey. The End of Project response rate is consistent with response rates for other ‘online’ surveys of ICT PD cluster teachers conducted prior to 2008.

It appears that the demographics of the respondent group for the End of Project survey was similar to that of the broader teacher population in the ICT PD programmes in terms of gender within the sectors. About 71% of respondents were females and 29% were males, which, when broken down by sector represents a ratio of female to male teachers among the primary sector respondents of 84% to16% and in the secondary sector of 50% to 50%. Compared to the general gender distribution of teachers in the respective sectors, therefore, female and male teachers were proportionally represented in the 2006-8 ICT PD cohort.

About 60% of responding teachers taught at primary school level, 38% at secondary, and the remaining 2% taught both primary and secondary students. As had been the case for all but one (2003-5) of the previous cohorts, the proportion of primary school participants in this ICT PD cohort was significantly larger than that of secondary. In this cohort primary school teachers are over represented compared to secondary teachers but by somewhat lower margins than most of the previous cohorts.

A strong correlation was evident in studies of previous ICT PD cohorts between the length of time that individual teachers were actively engaged in the programme and their subsequent levels of confidence and classroom usage of ICTs. In the 2006-8 cohort, almost half of teachers were actively engaged in the ICT PD programme for more than 2 of the 3 years of the programme. Only 8% of teachers had been in a programme for short-term periods of less than six months (Table 4). These proportions are roughly comparable with those for the previous cohort of 2005-7.