Summary and Reflections

SITES 2006 was designed and conducted within a global context of increasing policy interest in the use of ICT in schools to help students develop 21st-century skills, such as the ability to engage in collaborative knowledge creation and problem-solving with peers and experts around the world. As detailed in Chapter 2, the design of SITES 2006 was informed by the rich literature on ICT in education that points to the important influence of pedagogical orientation on the outcomes of ICT-use in teaching and learning. Hence, this study has not been a study of ICT-use per se, but a study of ICT-use within the context of the overall pedagogical practice of the teacher. The contextual factors examined in this study also include those found pertinent to supporting pedagogical change and innovation.

SITES 2006 was designed in a way that would not only help us understand the status of pedagogy and ICT-use in mathematics and science classrooms and the status of various contextual factors at work at the school- and system-levels in the participating systems, but also let us build models aimed at explaining how various contextual factors may contribute to the pedagogical use of ICT by teachers. This final chapter reports on some initial findings from explorations to build such explanatory models. In particular, it reports findings from multilevel analyses of school- and teacher-level indicators that shed light on whether some key strategic factors commonly found in ICT-related educational policies do, indeed, influence teachers’ pedagogical use of ICT. In addition, this chapter offers teachers, school leaders, and policymakers recommendations on ways of using ICT to support the development of 21st-century abilities in learners. Before describing the findings from the relational analysis and presenting the recommenddations, I begin this final chapter with an overview of the key findings reported in the previous chapters.