PATTERNS OF SOFTWARE USE Some teachers have their
students use only one or two types of software, while other teachers integrate a variety of types of software into their students' learning. For example, many teachers have their students only use word processing or only
skill-practice games and drills and don't have them use other computer applications except occasionally. At the other extreme, teachers whose students frequently use multimedia authoring or presentation software or e-mail typically
have their students use many other types of software as well. Specifically, one-half (51%) of teachers whose students frequently use multimedia authoring software also at least occasionally have students play computer games
for practicing skills, but only 17% of teachers whose students frequently use computer-based skill games also use multimedia software on occasion. The same pattern exists for teachers who used e-mail and presentation software—that
is, a much higher proportion of them also reported using games but the reverse was not true. We can see three reasons for the difference in the breadth of computer-based teaching between teachers whose students use
word-processing or skill-games and those who have students use presentation, e-mail, and multimedia software. First, these two groups of teachers may have different teaching responsibilities. Teachers of computer
classes would be likely to have students use a greater variety of software than would history teachers, for example. Second, there is an order of difficulty involved in the use of different types of software. In order
for their students to use presentation software or multimedia authoring software, teachers must have greater facility with having students do computer-based projects, and they may need more general expertise in the use of computers
as well. Third, teachers whose students do e-mail and multimedia projects may have different objectives for computer use and different teaching philosophies than those who assign computer-based drills or word
processing. For example, they may see students using computers to learn through making products or through communicating ideas to others while skill-game-using teachers and even many word-processing-assigning teachers may see
computers as valuable for students to simply "do school work." In this section of this report, we examine the patterns of software use among different groups of teachers, and how their pattern of use relates to their teaching
responsibilities, computer expertise, and their objectives for computer use. A Typology of Teachers' Software Use "Cluster Analysis" is an iterative process of sorting people's responses to survey
questions into a set of categories so that people with similar patterns of responses are grouped into the same category. In this case, the survey responses are each teacher's report of the frequency that they had their
students use each of 10 types of software. Because the age of their students so clearly affects the types of software that teachers use, the sorting was done separately for elementary, middle, and high school teachers. Only
teachers who reported some use of software by their students during class were included in the analysis. For each level of teaching, we specified that the clustering procedure For all three levels, the largest number of
computer-assigning teachers were part of a cluster we would call "limited users." These are teachers who do have students use computers, but no type of software is used more than occasionally (among the 10 software types
listed in the questionnaire). These limited users constitute nearly 30% of all teachers. (See Table 10.) When added to the 30% of teachers who do not use computers with students at all (Table 1), this leaves only 40% of
teachers whose pattern of computer use we will discuss in this section. TABLE 10: CLUSTER ANALYSIS OF PATTERN OF
SOFTWARE USE (MEAN SCALE SCORES*)
ELEMENTARY CLUSTER PROFILES
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