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1:1 COMPUTING IN UNIVERSITY TEACHER PREPARATION: REPORTING 5 YEARS' IMPACT 

(Handout) Joan E. Hughes 

joanh@mail.utexas.edu; 512.232.4145  

NECC, June 2009  

Background: Data collected from 2002‐2007 for evaluation purposes, including questions about laptop use by students and instructors (student perspective), software application use, some in‐class activity use, and college support. 

• Gained IRB approval to analyze anonymous data • Converted it to SPSS and hand coded in some cases when not in digital 

format • Analysis 1 (report included): General sweep of the data – overall patterns 

and significant changes across time • Analysis 2 (summer ’09): Analysis by content area certification groups • Analysis 3 (summer ’09): Application use analysis as categorized by 

NETS‐T   Summary of Significant and Important Findings from 2002­2007 ‘Analysis 1’ – represented in NECC paper  *Explain In‐program and Graduating Student Participants  

I. What kinds of software/hardware are preservice teachers and faculty using in courses and in PK-12 schools? a. Instructors’ use of laptops “nearly every class” on upward trend; 50-70%

(in-program); 20-60% (graduating); steady decline of ‘rare’ use (graduating) *Statistically sig change across time.

i. Concern: Rare use still high for in-program – 20-40% and higher than ‘less than half’ or ‘more than half’ %s

b. Students’ use of laptops *statistically sig change across time; in-program students data indicates less specific trends or increasing use; graduating students show sharp decline of ‘rare use’ and increases in ‘nearly every class’ or ‘more than half’

i. Concern: ‘Rare use’ still prominent (15-50% in recent years) for in-program students

ii. Concern: Students, overall, are not using laptops as much as their instructors are

c. Limitation: question language may omit out of class tech activities such as online activities that occur between class meetings

d. The ‘high use’ technologies used by instructors and students in the program are still mainly productivity and communication tools that have existed for years, such as email, presentation software, web browsing, search engine and word processing.

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i. Concern: High use apps are not necessarily contemporary applications that support creativity, collaboration, and inquiry – activities that are foundations of new media, the participatory culture of the Internet, and 21st Century skills.

e. We see more of the creativity-type software, such as concept mapping and digital movie and photo, being used at a medium-level use.

i. Kudos: Graduating students use of digital movies grew from 50% to 70%.

f. Instructors’ use of content area software is growing – but from nearly 0 to about 10%. Graduating students report the most use of content area software – which has grown from a low of 0% in 2003 to most recently 11% in 2007. In-program students, though, report 0% use of content area software. Most important, both graduating and in-program students report 0% content area software use in public school settings.

i. Concern: Content-area software poorly represented in use by instructors, graduates, and in-program students.

ii. Limitation: The concept of “content-area software” has changed dramatically; the term can be unclear as stated.

II. For what purposes/activities are laptops being used within university coursework? a. Graduating students have *sig change (increasing) in use of laptops for

developing lesson plans (strong 50-85%), teaching lessons (slight -80%), term projects (med 30-50%), group collab projects (med 20-40%), electronic portfolio (slight 5-20%).

b. In-program students have high use of laptops for all activities (~80%) [most consistent pattern in last three years] except electronic portfolio (~40%).

c. In public school settings, both graduates and in-program use laptops most for developing and teaching lessons.

i. Concern: It would be beneficial for students to recognize the potential for laptops being used by K-12 students as opposed to solely an administrative (lesson planning) or teaching (teaching lessons) tool for the teacher. [Recognize the infrastructure at schools bears on this issue.]

III. To what degree is the provided technology training/resources adequate to support laptop use in preservice preparation? a. Brown Bag and Three Hour Orientation * sig differences across time.

Percentage ‘not beneficial’ rises and falls but stays <20% for Three Hour Orientation and <50% for Brown Bag (must depend on topic).

b. iBook Help Desk and Campus Computer store most used Help resources. *Sig Diffs across time. High use early in program (2002), then falls (stabilizes around 2-3 access times/semester) than starts to rise again (2007).