Teachers' access to personal computers at school and at home has increased to the point where, by 1998, 93% of teachers in grades 4-12 were using computers as a part of their professional lives.  A majority of teachers now have a computer in their classroom and nearly 80% have one at home.  Most teachers find computers useful for preparing handouts for lessons, recording student grades, and doing other work of knowledge professionals.  However, what is most significant about teachers' involvement with computers is not their own professional use, but the role teachers play in directing students' use of this still-maturing and rapidly changing technology.  This report, the 3rd in a series from the Spring, 1998 national survey, Teaching, Learning, and Computing:1998, focuses on how teachers have incorporated computers into their instructional practices.

While the majority of American teachers (71%) assign computer work to students at least occasionally, only about one third do so on a regular basis.  Apart from computer teachers, business education and vocational teachers are more likely than teachers of other subjects to use computers regularly with students – i.e. it is quite typical for their students to use computers twenty times or more during the school year.  Aside from these more likely candidates for frequent computer use, English and elementary teachers are also more apt to use computers on a regular basis with their students.  In fact 30% of English teachers and 43% of elementary teachers (those who teach the traditional self-contained class) assign computer work frequently while only about one in six science teachers, one in eight math teachers, and one in ten social studies and fine arts teachers do. Thus, much of students' computer education experiences occur outside of academic courses, particularly at the high school level, when students are more likely than at other grade levels to be taking computer, business, or vocational courses.  At lower grade levels, however, when students have less opportunity to take these elective courses, their computer experience more likely occurs in academic classes.  For example, at the middle school level, 30% of students' experience using computers takes place in English classes.

Regular use of computers with students is highly dependent on access to computers. TLC data show that teachers who assign computer work to students use rooms with many computers in them.  However, besides computer teachers and business education teachers, most other teachers have relatively few computers compared to the number of students in their classroom.  In fact, only 14% of English and 13% of math teachers have a decent ratio of one computer for every four students.  Those who don't have this level of access in the classroom must therefore make use of shared spaces, like computers labs.  However, access to several computers in a classroom proves to be a more suitable setting for a great deal of school-based computer use than does an even greater number in a computer lab, particularly for academic secondary teachers.  Our data shows that computer-assigning academic secondary teachers who have at least one computer in their classroom for every four students are more than 3 times as likely to have students use computers on a regular basis than those who don't have classroom access and use computers in labs (62% are frequent users compared to 18% of those who have no computers in their classroom and use labs for their students' computer work).

Except for elementary teachers, who still make frequent use of game and drill software, skills-practice through computers has become much less common than other uses of computers.  In particular, word processing is used by students of 50% of all teachers in the study (grade 4-12 teachers) and CD-ROM reference software is used by 36% of all teachers.  As discussed more extensively in Report 1 in this series,[1] roughly 30% of all teachers have students use the World Wide Web.  Relatively few teachers make use of more analytic and project-oriented software, particularly on a frequent basis.  For example, only 4% of English teachers have students use presentation software on at least 10 occasions, and only 5% of science teachers had students use simulation or modeling software that often.  As for spreadsheet and database programs, only 7% of vocational education teachers had students use that type of software 10 times.  Math teachers, along with foreign language teachers, are among the least likely to be making computers a regular part of their instructional practice.  They are the only secondary subject category where skills-practice-games is the most common type of software used, and even then, only one-quarter of math teachers do that.

The software teachers most often name as their most valuable programs for student use are general office applications such as ClarisWorks and Microsoft Works and web browsers such as Netscape.  In addition, certain individual software titles attract noticeable numbers of teachers in specific fields: Accelerated Reader and Hyperstudio among elementary and some middle grades teachers, Geometer's Sketchpad in math, and AutoCAD in Vocational Education, to name the most-often mentioned ones.

We found it was useful to classify teachers according to the pattern of different types of software they had students use.  Several distinct patterns of use were uncovered at each school level--some emphasizing frequent use of a single type of software, others involving diverse types of software.  However, the most extensive and diverse software use practices taken together involve only a small percentage of teachers, on the order of 10 to 15% in total, and several of those clusters are dominated by computer and business education teachers.  However, several other "clusters" do contain disproportionate numbers of English teachers as well as secondary teachers of mixed academic subjects (a special category of teachers).

Just as skill and drill games are no longer the most commonly used software applications, objectives for computer use have extended beyond just "learning computer skills" or using computer games for the limited purpose of mastering content.  In fact, "finding out about ideas and information" was the most commonly reported objective followed by students "expressing themselves in writing." 

Teachers' objectives for students' computer use do vary by the subjects they teach. Social studies and teachers of mixed academic subjects are more interested in students finding out about ideas than are others while English and elementary teachers are more likely to be interested in students expressing themselves in writing.  In contrast, math, computer, and business teachers reported more traditional objectives.  They are more likely to select mastering skills and improving computer skills.  Of course teachers interested in skill-related objectives are more likely to use game software, but, they tend to use that type of software almost exclusively while teachers holding other objectives tend to use a greater variety of software.  For example, those interested in having students find out about ideas and information not only have students use CD-ROM reference software, and the World Wide Web, two applications naturally associated with information retrieval, but they were also likely to have their students use word processing software.

Aside from in-class computer work, TLC asked teachers how often their students worked on computer assignments for that class outside of class time.  This survey question proved quite revealing in distinguishing between teachers who see computers as tools that enable students to do productive work versus teachers who see computers in "skills" terms (either as a means for mastering basic literacy skills or as a new set of technology skills).  We found that teachers more likely to have students do computer work on their own time (e.g. before or after class) were more likely to select four main objectives for student computer use: "presenting information to an audience," "improving their writing," "communicating with other people," and "finding out about ideas and information."  Those objectives are all about building competencies for skill-integrating productive work.  The teachers who were less likely to report that their students used computers to do classwork outside of class time were more likely select as their top objectives reinforcing skills just taught, remediation of skills, and learning to work independently.  The fact that their students don't use computers outside of class is a consequence of how those teachers have defined the purpose of computers: isolated, decontextualized "learning."

A teacher's skill in using computers certainly has an impact on how they use computers, and in how they see their role to begin with.  TLC asked teachers to rate themselves on how well they knew how to perform certain tasks ranging from basic ones such as displaying the directory of a disk to more complex activities such as developing a multimedia document.  Teachers were also asked to self-evaluate their experience and expertise on different computer platforms.  Although the majority of teachers felt they were "very experienced" on at least one platform, only 3% felt that they were "expert" on multiple platforms (e.g., Macintosh AND Windows).  We found that the greater their platform expertise and the greater number of computer-related tasks teachers reported they could do, the more substantially they used computers for their own professional purposes.  Teacher computer skill level was also associated with more frequent assignment of computer work to students, but this relationship was not as strong as the one for teachers' own professional use of computers. We also found that the more computer-skilled teachers were, the more likely their primary objective for having students use computers had to do with students presenting material, communicating electronically, and analyzing information.  Teachers simply interested in having students use computers for purposes of remediating skills were those with lower levels of computer expertise.

Finally, we combined information about teacher expertise, teacher professional use, and objectives for student computer use most closely associated with higher levels of student use outside of class time to identify those clusters of teachers who are strongest on all those dimensions.  At the elementary level, we identified two clusters of teachers who are strong in these respects (although together involving only 5% of all upper-elementary teachers).  Both emphasized student production of multimedia and a majority of both groups named one program, Hyperstudio, as their most valuable software.  At the middle grades, two clusters also appeared notable (4% of middle grades teachers), and these classes emphasized word processing and use of the World Wide Web, along with some use of electronic mail (in one cluster) and presentation and multimedia software as well.  At the high school level, five clusters of teachers had relatively high levels of computer expertise (13% of high school teachers), but only one of those clusters (2% of high school teachers) seemed outstanding in terms of having objectives for student computer use that translated into high levels of out-of-class involvement in computer work for the class.  Those classes, primarily English, social studies, and computer classes, used an array of software going beyond word processing, Web browsing, and CD-ROM use, to include presentation software (Powerpoint was second-only to Netscape as those teachers' most valued software) and other graphically-oriented programs.

Though teachers in these clusters constitute only a minority of teachers, due to their exemplary use of computers with students, they deserve even closer examination.

Guide to Data Tables

A "Summary of Study Methodology" is attached as Appendix B to this report, and provides a more complete background to the design of the TLC survey.  The following are some additional notes, particularly oriented towards interpreting the data tables:

Although the data tables are based on weighted cases (weights inverse to the probability of selection), raw N's (number of teachers responding) accompany most tables.  Those numbers provide a rough sense of the sampling reliability of a cell's mean or a set of row or column percentages without the additional complexity of displaying standard deviations and significance levels and/or effect sizes for all of the many comparisons that might be made with a table's statistics.  The comparisons are shown largely to suggest and explore propositions rather than to test specific hypotheses.  Moreover, analyses are bi-variate or involve at most three variables; future research that simultaneously incorporates multiple predictor variables to test propositions about explanation of variance will include tests of statistical significance as appropriate.

Generally speaking, the sample population for any given table is one of several types: (a) all teachers in the probability sample (see Appendix B); (b) all teachers in both the probability and purposive samples; (c) teachers (in either (a) or (b)) who assigned computer work to any of their classes; or (d) teachers who assigned computer work to a specific class which they selected as the one in which they felt they most successfully accomplished their teaching objectives.  The latter two groups are both referred to as "computer-assigning teachers."  The sample population for each table is described next to the term "universe," under each table.

A number of tables divide teachers by the subject-matter of the classes that they teach.  Middle and high school teachers are designated by the subject they teach to more than one-half of their teaching load.  Teachers who teach two subjects equally or a range of subjects are classified as either "mixed academic secondary" or "other applied secondary," depending on the nature of their courses. Tables that are based on a single class—the teacher's specifically selected class—have similar categories except that instead of "mixed academic," the phrase "misc. academic" is used.  Elementary grade teachers (grades 4 through 6 in K-6 or K-5 schools as well as grades 4 and 5 in schools that go above grade 6) are broken out into only two categories: those who teach a single self-contained class (same students, all subjects), and those who teach a single subject or some combination of multiple classes and multiple subjects.

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