Our survey asked teachers to rank themselves in terms of their experience with Windows or DOS computers and Macintosh computers.  Altogether, slightly more than one-third of all 4 ^th through 12^th grade teachers consider themselves very experienced or expert on each platform— 34% for Windows/DOS, 31% for Macintosh.  We discovered some interesting differences between these teachers with different platform expertise.

We found that teachers with Macintosh expertise are more constructivist in both philosophy and general teaching practice than are other teachers.  That is, their teaching was more likely to involve…

• designing activities around teacher and student interests rather than in response to an externally mandated curriculum,
• having students engage in collaborative group projects where skills are taught and practiced in authentic contexts rather than in a sequence of  textbook exercises,
• focusing instruction on students' understanding of complex ideas rather than on definitions and facts,
• teaching students to self-consciously assess their own understanding, in contrast to multiple-choice testing
• modeling learning, rather than presenting oneself as fully knowledgeable.

One example of the constructivist leanings of Macintosh-experts is illustrated in Figure A.   It shows that 72% of Macintosh-experts compared to less than 54% of others (those with expertise in both platforms, Windows/DOS only, or neither) believe that the more constructivist approach of Mr. Jones allows students to gain more useful skills than the traditional approach of Ms. Hill. (See figure for details on the teaching method of each teacher.)

This tendency toward a more constructivist philosophy and practice may be due to the fact that Macintosh-expert teachers tend to be responsible for younger students and teachers of younger students exhibit more constructivist points of view than high school teachers, both in philosophy and in actual practice.  However, even when we looked at teachers of the same school levels and teachers who teach the same subjects, Macintosh-expert teachers appear more constructivist than Windows-expert teachers.

Perhaps the most important finding is illustrated in Figure B.  It shows that Windows-expert teachers appear to be almost indistinguishable from other computer-using teachers who are not "very experienced" in either platform in terms of the constructivism of their teaching philosophy, their assessment strategies, and the constructivism of their teaching practice.  (Note that in this figure, we separate the non-computer users from those who use computers but are not expert in either Mac or Windows/DOS.)  Looking at both philosophy and actual practice, teachers who are expert (or "very experienced") on the Macintosh platform, whether or not they are also expert in Windows, score substantially higher (about 0.3 s.d.) than either Windows/DOS-only expert teachers or other computer-using teachers, while the latter two groups have very similar mean index scores, differing by about 0.05 s.d.  Thus, Windows / DOS -expert teachers are no more constructivist than non-expert computer-using teachers are, while Macintosh-expert teachers are substantially more constructivist.  The same is true for differences in assessment preferences, but to a somewhat lesser extent.

Why do we observe these differences?  One explanation may be that where teachers exert greater control over their instructional environment, including computers, they may be more constructivist and more apt to select Macintosh computers and become expert in their use.  In contrast, where administrators orchestrate computer buying, acquisitions may be more likely to go in the direction of Windows computers, and teachers in administrator-dominated schools may be more traditional (transmission-oriented) in their teaching practice.  This explanation depends on there being an association between constructivist pedagogy and teacher control over the workplace environment, which is very close to the proposition analyzed and supported in the special report by Becker and Riel entitled "Teacher Professionalism, School Work Culture, and the Emergence of Constructivist-Compatible Pedagogies"

Exploring this theory further, when we compare platform experience with the role orientation of teachers (Figure C), we find that teachers categorized as either strongly collaborative or leaders in their professional community are indeed about 10% more likely to be Macintosh-experts than Windows-experts (36% vs. 25% and 29% vs. 20% respectively).  Meanwhile, teachers who don't interact with their practitioner colleagues or who do so, but to a lesser extent, are not any more likely to be expert in Macintosh than they are to be expert in Windows/DOS. (Figure C also demonstrates that more collaboratively-oriented teachers and leaders are much more likely to be experts or very experienced on one of the platforms than the "private practice" oriented teacher.)

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