Data Source

Teaching, Learning, and Computing (TLC) is a national survey of more than 4,000 teachers from grades 4-12 conducted in Spring, 1998, under a grant from the National Science Foundation with funds also provided by the Field-Initiated Studies program of the U.S. Department of Education’s O.E.R.I. Teachers provided information principally about their teaching philosophy and actual teaching practices in one specific class, their access to and use of computers as a classroom teaching resource and in also in their own professional work, other aspects of their work environment, their outside professional activities, and their personal background. In addition, school-level data was provided by the school’s principal and the individual selected by the principal as "technology coordinator." Four different versions of the teacher survey booklet were used, with overlapping sets of questions. Survey instruments are available at http://www.crito.uci.edu/tlc/html/questionnaires.html.

Somewhat more than one-half of the 1,616 schools sampled for the study (56%) were a stratified national probability sample of elementary (299 schools), middle (253), and high schools (346), including 83 private and parochial schools. Schools were selected according to size and presence of computer technology, oversampling larger schools and those with a greater density of various computer technologies. The remaining samples of schools are referred to as "purposive samples" and were based on compiling, refining, and sampling from lists of two basic types of schools: "High-end Technology" schools are schools with substantial amounts of computer technology per capita, including schools selected from the upper-end of Quality Education Data, Inc's, Technology Index and schools identified through books, articles in magazines and school web-sites. "Reform Program" schools were compiled by identifying schools or individual teachers who had been long-term (3 year+) participants in one of 54 different national or regional externally-defined “programs” of major school or instructional reform.

In all three school samples, teachers were sampled from grades 4-12 and from all subjects except physical education and special education. At each sampled school, three to five teachers (3, elementary; 5, middle and high school) were selected with probabilities related to the teacher’s reputed use of technology and group projects and emphasis on higher-order thinking. A small number of teachers (a maximum of 2 per school) were selected with certainty based on the principal’s attribution of that teacher having an exemplary instructional practice or based on their known participation in the selected program of instructional reform. Because unequal probabilities were used to select both schools and teachers, all analysis employs weighted data using weights that are inverse to the probability of selection.[1] Much of the descriptive analysis makes use only of the schools and teachers in the national probability sample. Additional information about the sampling design can be found in Appendix B to TLC Report 3 – Teacher and Teacher-Directed Student Use of Computers and Software. (See also Exhibit 2.)

Across the three samples, 1,215 of the 1,616 schools selected for participation agreed to participate in the study (75%). Response rates of individually selected teachers, principals, and technology coordinators averaged about 70%. Altogether, responses were obtained from 4,083 teachers of grade 4 and higher, in 1,150 schools, as well as 845 technology coordinators and 867 school principals.

[1] As modified by stratum-specific non-response rates and within-school partial completions of teacher rosters.