Data and Methods
Source of Data, Sampling, and Weighting This study of teacher professionalism and pedagogy is drawn from data collected in 1998 as part of a national survey of teachers' use of computer technologies and their
pedagogies. "Teaching, Learning, and Computing–1998" surveyed teachers from a national probability sample of schools–898 schools stratified by school level (elementary, middle, high school)–and 718 additional schools
selected either because of the presence of substantial computer technology in the school or because of the involvement of at least one teacher, if not the whole school, in instructional reform activities. Seventy-five percent of schools (N=1215) participated to the point of rostering their teachers for sampling. Among the teachers sampled or selected with certainty, 4,083
provided completed useable surveys, 67% of those rostered and sampled. This includes 2,251 teachers from the probability sample, 1,236 from reform-involved schools, and 596 from the high technology-presence schools. The analysis for this paper combines the probability and the two selected samples in such a way as to take account of the sampling weights of different schools and different teachers in the same school. We also maintain
the balance in total numbers between the probability sample (55% of the total sample) and the two selected samples. The teacher respondents were asked to complete a survey booklet about their
teaching practice, teaching beliefs, and their work environment that was 21 pages in length and required approximately 60-75 minutes. Four different versions of the teacher survey booklet were used, with overlapping sets of
questions. Many of the survey questions about instructional practice and teaching philosophy were validated by a prior study (Becker & Anderson, 1998). That research compared teacher questionnaire responses to
field-researcher-team judgments based on three in-depth interviews and three hour-long classroom observations. Those items for which teacher responses most closely matched those made by the interviewer-observers were included in
(or adapted for) the final versions of the questionnaires. Operationalization of Constructs Orientation towards the Teaching Role: Private versus Collaborative Practice
Teachers who define their work as primarily located in the classroom and concerned with the implementation of mandated policies (private practice) will not place a high value on interaction with their peers.
The teachers at the other end of our contrast set are those who are actively engaged with their peers with some who take on leadership roles. The contrast between a private practice orientation versus a collaborative practice
leading to our attribution of "professional leadership" at the upper end was measured by three multi-part survey questions: Within-School Teacher Interaction. From one question, an index of "within-school teacher
interaction" was calculated. This was the average frequency that the teacher reported having each of six types of interactions with other teachers at the teacher's own school–discussions about teaching methods, project ideas,
subject-matter issues, and technology; and informal observations of another teacher's teaching and observations by another teacher of her own teaching. In addition to the average score across those six types of contact, teachers
were divided into high, average, and low levels of interaction. This was based on whether their average frequency of having each of these interactions was closer to "never or seldom," "several per month," or "1-3 times
per week." Beyond-School Teacher Contact. A second survey question dealt with similar interactions—but with teachers at other schools. "Beyond-school teacher contact" was defined as how many of the following three
criteria the teachers met: attending workshops with teachers from other schools at least 3 times since September; going to 3 or more committee meetings with teachers from other schools; and using electronic mail with teachers at
other schools at least a half-dozen times. Leadership. The third survey question asked about the teacher's involvement over the past three years in six types of leadership activities within the profession, including
mentoring other teachers (2 measures), giving workshop presentations (2 measures), teaching college-level courses, and publishing. The number among these six activities reported by the teacher formed the teacher's "leadership"
score. School Work Culture: Professional Culture vs. Bureaucratic Culture Teachers were asked to respond to eleven statements about different aspects of their work environment by
indicating to what extent the statements described their own work situation (six-point agree-disagree scales). These statements dealt with four aspects of work environments for teachers: consensus and salience of schoolwide
goals; how teacher learning opportunities were organized; the presence or absence of a collegial learning community among teachers; and teacher recognition and peer-evaluation practices. Although each teacher can provide information about his or her work environment, the other teachers at the same school are also informants about that environment. Thus, in most of our analyses, the value assigned to
each teacher was not his or her own particular report, but the aggregate of such reports from all of the responding teachers at the same school. Teacher reports were averaged, weighted by the weighting value for each
individual teacher, and aggregate variables calculated. Teachers from schools for which fewer than four teachers provided data were excluded from the analysis. When we combine the eleven aggregate work environment variables
reported by all sampled teachers, we get what we call School Work Culture. A professional culture is indicated by teachers playing important roles in defining staff development activities, teachers pressing their peers to
improve their performance, teachers encouraging one another to try new ideas, and discussions of school goals being a central and salient activity at meetings. A bureaucratic culture is indicated by the belief among
responding teachers that those features of school work life are, in fact, absent. Each feature we consider part of the teacher's work environment; the set of features together constitutes the School Work Culture.
Pedagogy: Information/Skills Transmission vs. Knowledge Construction To measure instructional practice, teachers were asked a set of questions that were focused on how frequently specific
activities occurred in a class that they selected as an example of their best teaching. An index was constructed based on the mean scores of 25 item prompts from four survey questions: Methods used to introduce the current
unit to the class (each item on a 3-point scale): introductory drills (coded in the direction of "skill/knowledge"); and small group discussions, making conjectures, and raising open-ended questions (all coded "knowledge
construction"). Reasons given for asking students questions (5-point frequency scales): verifying if students knew the right answer and verifying if homework was done ("skill/knowledge"); and eliciting student opinion, getting
students to justify their reasoning, and relating issues to students' experiences ("knowledge construction"). Frequency of types of assignments and class activities (5-point scales): individual seatwork, hands-on activities,
weeklong projects, journal-writing, planning classroom activities, problem-solving in small groups, working on problems with no obvious method for solving, and explaining their reasoning by writing (all but the first coded
"knowledge construction"). Amount of time students spent in these types of activities (4-point scales): formal debates, designing their own problems to solve, small group discussions of procedures for solving problems,
doing oral or written reflection on their own work, tasks involving multiple representations of the same idea, making a product to be used by someone else, demonstrating work to an audience (other than their class or
parents), and undertaking tasks without clear correct answers (all "knowledge construction" items). The alpha reliability for this index was .86. ). Pedagogical Change. To measure how teachers'
practice has changed over the past three years, we use a retrospective self-assessment that combines 16 items, only 8 of which were asked to any one group of responding teachers. These include both items asking about
increases in traditional practices (reverse-scored) Educational Philosophy: Traditional Beliefs vs. Constructivist Beliefs In our model, teacher beliefs about good practice is seen as a control variable in
the main analysis—a clearly important determinant of a teacher's pedagogy that needs to be taken into account when examining the relationship between role orientation and constructivist practice. Our measure of teaching philosophy
comes from three survey questions, incorporating 12 individual prompts. An index was created by taking the mean of these 12 prompts, after equalizing item standard deviations (effectively creating standard scores for items). The alpha reliability for this index was .84, with item-total
correlations of .37 to .62. For this paper, the index was divided roughly into quartiles, with teachers in the lowest quartile classified as "most traditional" and those in the highest quartile as "most constructivist" in
terms of philosophy.