Part I. Teacher-Directed Student Use of Computers By the 1997-98 school year, almost three-quarters of American teachers (71% among teachers of grades 4-12) had students
use computers during class time at some point during the school year. In some cases, teachers used computers with certain classes but not others. However, 60% of all teachers had students use computers in the single
class that we sampled for further study: the class where they felt most satisfied with their teaching—"where you accomplish your teaching goals most often." Teachers of some subjects FIGURE 1:
BASIC DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS
COMPUTERS IN THEIR CLASSES
 |
TABLE 1: TEACHERS' COMPUTER USE PRACTICE BY SUBJECT & LEVEL
Nearly all teachers, including most of those who do not assign computer work, are computer users themselves. For eleven of the thirteen subject-level categories studied (all
except secondary math and social studies), more than 90% of teachers either had their students use computers or used them for their own professional needs. A majority of teachers whose students use computers make use of computers in their own classroom (nearly 80% at the elementary level and about 60% in middle and high
schools). However, at each school level only a minority of computer-assigning teachers uses their classroom as the sole primary location of computer use during class time.
Nearly 40% of elementary computer-assigning teachers (and 20% of secondary teachers) have their students do much of their computer work both in the classroom and in another
location. In most cases, that other location is a "computer lab," but sometimes the library or media center serves that function too. Moreover, one-fifth of computer-assigning
elementary teachers and two-fifths of those at secondary levels make the computer lab (or other non-classroom location) the primary place where their students do computer work during class time.
There are major differences between teachers of different subjects in where their students use computers during class time. Those differences are discussed below under the topic of "access to classroom computers." In Table 1, teachers were counted as "computer-assigning teachers" even if they had
students use computers only rarely or occasionally. However, unless teachers assign computer tasks frequently, important consequences are not likely to occur. Table 2 draws attention to those classes Using that criterion for applying the term "frequent student computer use," we see that, as
of Spring, 1998, only one-fourth of all 4th-12th grade teachers (27%) gave students a frequent opportunity to use computers during class time. Variations across teachers of
different subject-level categories are even greater than for our measure of "any student computer use." The left-hand side of Table 2 shows that the vast majority of secondary
teachers of computer classes (80%) and two-thirds of secondary business education teachers (70%) had the students in their selected class use computers on more than 20
occasions. Also, a substantial fraction of vocational teachers (42%), elementary teachers of self-contained classes (43%), and secondary English teachers (24%) had their students
use computers frequently. At the other extreme, only 11 to 17 percent of secondary math, social studies and science teachers frequently assigned computer work, as did fewer than one in ten fine arts teachers. TABLE 2: FREQUENT STUDENT COMPUTER USE, BY SUBJECT & LEVEL Rather than asking what percent of teachers use computers frequently with students, it is
also helpful to examine computer use from a student experience perspective; that is, "In what classes do students get their more intensive computer experiences?" The last three
columns of Table 2 present the fraction of all "frequent use experiences" that occur in classes of different subjects, for elementary, middle, and high school levels respectively.
The vast majority of frequent use at the elementary level occurs in the self-contained classes (78%), but at the secondary levels, the breakdown of use by subject reveals some interesting patterns.
FIGURE 2: FREQUENT COMPUTER USE: CLASSES WHERE TYPICAL STUDENT
USED COMPUTERS MORE THAN 20 TIMES DURING THE YEAR
 |
In secondary schools as a whole, frequent student computer use occurs in English classes more often than in any other subject—including computer classes. That is
because, at any one time, only a modest fraction of students are taking computer classes, but nearly every student is taking English. English class settings for frequent
computer use are particularly common at the middle school level, where the second-most common venue, mathematics, occurs less than two-thirds as often (17% vs. 28%).
At the high school level, frequent computer use occurs as often in business education classes as in English (each had 19% of all frequent use experiences), with computer
classes third (16%). Overall, a majority of high schoolers' frequent computer experiences occur outside of the academic subjects. At the high school level, as students move closer
toward the working world, they are more likely to take specialized classes that teach the application of computers to adult-related tasks.