First Year Teachers' Technology Use: Perceptions of Factors Affecting Technology Integration

Abstract

For decades, technology integration into the classroom and curriculum has been at the forefront of education. Although public perception and technology funding assumes that teachers are integrating technology into the curriculum, research shows that actual integration is still far from being fully implemented. This study detailed how first-year teachers deal with technology integration from a concerns-based approach. The study was designed to help post-secondary institutions understand the concerns of first year teachers with regard to their preparatory steps regarding technology use in the curriculum. Secondarily, it was a means to explore different external factors that support teachers in the field and technology integration. The study was grounded by the Concerns-Based Adoption Model (CBAM), first proposed by Hall, Wallace, and Dossett in 1973. CBAM, a widely used framework, allows researchers to assess responses to various innovations in three different ways: (a) concerns about innovation, (b) levels of use of the innovation, and (c) quality of implementation of the innovation. Implementing the first measurement strategy to understand overall teacher concerns, CBAM profiles were generated for 22 first-year teachers. These profiles represented a range of first-year teacher concerns and formed a selection of a sample group, based on the top three concern groups, who were randomly interviewed and data were triangulated and used to clarify CBAM findings. To guide this study, two questions were investigated: (a) What are first-year teachers' concerns towards the use of technology in their classrooms to achieve higher-level learning as shown by their score on the Stages of Concern Questionnaire (SoCQ)? and (b). What do first-year teachers express as their concerns with technology use? Overall group data, as well as individual interviews, indicated that the greatest concern of the majority of the first-year teachers participating in this study lay within Stages One and Two, which are defined as the stages in which self-concern is great and little thought is spent on others or the use of technology. This paralleled teacher development theories that first-year teachers are in a state of no concern or most concerned about themselves as the teacher. Thus, they are less concerned about the student and the curriculum. Both quantitative and qualitative evidence explained that first-year teachers have varying concerns about technology use in the classroom, and there is a call for external support mechanisms to assist them with integrating technology into the curriculum.