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This material is available primarily for archival purposes. Telephone numbers or other contact information may be out of date; please see current contact information at media contacts.
Use and Impact of Computer Technology Escalate in K-12 EducationThe nation's most progressive teachers -- those using innovative methods to reach today’s children by making school tasks more meaningful -- are the teachers who are most likely to use the Internet in their classrooms. That's according to the first of 12 planned reports funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Education documenting computer technology and its use in schools. "These are non-traditional teachers," said Henry J. Becker, the study's director at the University of California-Irvine's Department of Education. "They are willing to take this new domain of 'cyberspace' and try to integrate it in useful ways into the traditional 'classroom space,'" he said. The two reports just released, Internet Use by Teachers: Conditions of Professional Use and Teacher-Directed Student Use (Report #1) and The Presence of Computers in American Schools (Report #2), were co-authored by Becker and Ronald Anderson, a researcher at the University of Minnesota. Computers are now pervasive in Americans' lives. The series documents the extent to which computer technologies and the World Wide Web are becoming integral to U.S. elementary and secondary classrooms. The entire series of reports, Teaching, Learning and Computing: 1998, a National Survey of Schools and Teachers, is being released over a six-month period and examines how teaching and learning are affected by computer and Internet use in the classroom. The first report in the study examined teachers' use of computer technology and their teaching styles as well as their school context. The second study documented the presence of computers in schools. According to Report #2, more than 90 percent of schools now have some level of access to the Internet, and nearly a majority of all 4th through 12th grade teachers have access in their own classrooms. Just one year ago, 68 percent of teachers reported having used the Internet to construct lesson plans, and 28 percent reported having done this on a weekly or more frequent basis. Becker and Anderson documented changes in the rate schools obtain and replace computer equipment. In 1992, there was one computer for every 14 students; as of 1998, there was one for every six. But the authors report challenges. Half of all teachers surveyed said they need technical support at least once a month as they integrate technology into lessons. Two-thirds of them said timely support is not available. The reports' conclusions are based on a national probability sample of schools and teachers and included more than 4,000 teachers, technology coordinators, and school principals. The researchers also included additional samples of schools and teachers specifically because of their participation in major school reform programs or their unusually extensive computer technology. This series of reports differs from commercially available annual surveys of computers in schools in the depth and comprehensiveness of the analyses. "The fact that the data is 1998 information is impetus to keep production of the report series moving," said Becker, "so that conclusions are useful within the short shelf-life of the rapidly changing technology environment of our nation’s schools." Ten more reports will be released throughout the fall and winter, to be published by the Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations at the University of California-Irvine.
Editors: Findings to date are available at: http://www.crito.uci.edu/TLC
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