Attitudes Towards Information Technology
Among Teachers at Six Texas Middle Schools
Technical Report 98.2
Telecommunications and Informatics Laboratory
Texas Center for Educational Technology
Gerald Knezek, Director
Rhonda Christensen, Research Associate
Dana Arrowood, Research Assistant
Draft May 31, 1998
Introduction
This report compares the technology related attitudes of teachers at a South Texas Middle School to those of teachers at five other middle/junior high schools in North Central Texas. Data were gathered in January and February of 1998 at all sites. Teachers at the South Texas school had connections to the WWW in every classroom, while most of the North Texas schools had limited access but were in the process of preparing for WWW access during the spring of 1998.
Participants
Two hundred twenty-five educators from the six schools included in the analysis returned completed questionnaires. The distribution of the educators among the schools was:
| School ID | Surveys Completed |
| 14 | 36 |
| 15 | 25 |
| 16 | 28 |
| 17 | 20 |
| 18 | 88 |
| 19 | 28 |
Instrumentation
The Teachers Attitudes Toward Information Technology Questionnaire versions 3.11 and 3.2 were used to gather data from these teachers. This instrument contained items for the seven factor structure of the Teachers Attitudes Toward Computers Questionnaire (TAC) plus five semantic differential scales from previous versions of the Teachers Attitudes Toward Information Technology Questionnaire (TAT). The following scales had data from all six sites and hence were included in the analysis:
Results and Discussion
As shown in Table 1, an Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) carried out on the data indicated there were significant (p<.05) differences among the six schools in the areas of: Email for Classroom Learning, Semantic Perception of Computers, Semantic Perception of the World Wide Web for Teachers, and Semantic Perception of Computers for Classroom Learning. Scheffe’s Multiple Range Test was conducted to determine which specific schools, if any, were significantly different from the others in these four measurement areas.
With respect to views regarding Email for Classroom Learning, school 14 educators were significantly (p<.05) more positive than educators from schools 15, 16, or 17, but not significantly more positive than educators from schools 18 or 19. It will be interesting to follow up and learn if schools 14, 18, and 19 were all using Email within their schools (even if only among teachers) at the time of the survey administrations.
Educators’ Semantic Perception of Computers also varied greatly from school to school, but there were no pair-wise differences large enough to reach significance. However, the trends in the data appear to be that schools 14, 18 and 19 are highly positive in this area. This trend is similar to that reported for attitudes toward Email for Classroom Learning in the previous paragraph.
School 14 educators’ Semantic Perception of the World Wide Web for Teachers was significantly higher than those of educators from school 16, probably because school 14 educators had high speed access to the World Wide Web in their classrooms at the time the survey was administered. The trends in attitudes toward the World Wide Web appear to be that school 14 educators have very positive attitudes, while school 17, 18, and 19 educators have middle level attitudes, and schools 15 and 16 educators have lower attitudes than the other groups. A follow-up study may shed light on the reasons for these differences.
No two schools were significantly different from each other on the index of Computer Productivity for Classroom Learning. However, it appears that educators from school 16 are lower in this area, educators from schools 15, 17, and 18 are in the middle, and educators from schools 14 and 19 as a group, are high.
These trends are graphically illustrated in Figure 1.