Teacher Characteristics, Contextual Factors, and How These Affect the Pedagogical Use of ICT

Whether and how teachers use ICT in their teaching and their pedagogical orientations are influenced by personal, organizational, and system-level factors. In accordance with the conceptual framework described in Chapter 2, the teacher questionnaire was designed to collect data on a number of variables related to these three categories of factors. Questions related to the personal characteristics of the teacher included demographic information (age, gender, highest level of academic qualification reached, possession or otherwise of a teaching license) and his or her self-perceived technical and pedagogical competence when using ICT. The teachers were also asked to respond to a number of questions related to their experiences of factors at the school and system levels: (1) the availability and usefulness of different kinds of professional development activities; (2) obstacles to realizing their [teachers’] vision for ICT-use; and (3) the presence of features indicative of a community of practice in the school.

This chapter begins by profiling the mathematics teachers’ and science teachers’ characteristics and these teachers’ perceptions of the specified school- and system-level factors. In addition, we offer some preliminary explorations concerning possible relationships between the personal-, school-, and system-level factors and whether the teachers were using ICT when teaching the target classes. In cases where categorical data such as gender were collected, we also present the percentage of teachers in each category who reported using ICT with the target class. This information allowed us some initial insights into whether and how these characteristics (captured through categorical data) correlated with teachers’ use of ICT when teaching. For contextual data that are, by nature, continuous, such as the teachers’ self-reported competence and the extent to which obstacles or support were present, we used binary logistic regression analysis to explore the relationship, and we report the key findings later in this chapter. While more sophisticated explorations on the relationships between various personal and contextual factors with the different aspects of teachers’ pedagogical use of ICT reported in Chapter 5 are clearly warranted, these have been beyond the scope of this first international report. Hopefully, however, the work presented in this publication will be followed by more in-depth analysis at system and cross-national levels.