AUTHOR: Henry J. Becker
Center for Research on Information Technology & Organizations
University of California, Irvine

April 2001

Paper presented at the 2001 Meetings of the American Educational Research Association

We often speak about computers in classrooms as if we and our audience have a common view of what they are and what function they serve. But the character of computers and their functionality have been very different at different points in time (Exhibit 1) and, as will be shown here, remain quite different for teachers of different subjects, teachers who teach students of different ages and backgrounds, and teachers who have characteristically different pedagogies.

This paper presents descriptive data from a large, national survey of teachers and their teaching practices in order to highlight some of the important differences in computer use patterns, and thereby to at least slightly contextualize general discussions about teachers’ computer use. These findings may also be useful for considering the likely effects of current teaching practices, subject-by-subject, level-by-level, and pedagogy-by-pedagogy. A fuller treatment of the research literature on differential computer use practices will be provided in a later draft.