Date of Award

2016

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Department

Psychology

Sub-Department

College of Arts and Sciences

First Advisor

Abraham Wandersman

Abstract

As computing technology has advanced over the last several decades, many schools and school districts have embraced the use of this technology in education. One way in which schools and school districts have adopted computing technology is through adopting 1:1 computer initiatives where each student is provided with a computing device. However, despite the widespread and continuously expanding use of 1:1 computer initiatives within the educational setting, surprisingly little is known about the classroom-level factors that may impact student educational outcomes. Only one study to date (Shapley et al., 2010) has attempted to investigate specific classroom-level factors that may impact student outcomes within a 1:1 initiative. Therefore, the current study examined the impact of specific, technology-supported teaching strategies (personalized learning, authentic learning, and computer-supported collaborative learning) on students’ school satisfaction, academic outcomes, and 21st century skills. The study was conducted on a dataset consisting of approximately 8, 047 students and 517 teachers in grades 3-8 from a Southeastern school district that implemented a 1:1 technology initiative. The students surveyed provided information about their overall school satisfaction as well as their perceptions of their teachers’ use of the personalized, authentic, and computer-supported collaborative teaching strategies and overall levels of computer use in the classroom. The teachers also supplied their perceptions of their own use of these strategies. A subsample of students also participated in an assessment of their 21st century learning skills. In order to examine the potential for school-wide impacts on student outcomes, models were run with school-level variables that included school-wide levels of students’ perceptions of teachers’ use of technology-supported teaching strategies, school-wide levels of teachers’ perceptions of their own use of these strategies, as well as school-wide measures of 1:1 implementation quality. Study 1 examined the impact of the technology-supported teaching strategies mentioned above on students’ school engagement and academic outcomes. Multi-level analyses revealed that students’ perceptions of their teachers’ use of personalized and authentic learning strategies had a significant, positive relationship with students’ school engagement. Results also indicated that students’ perceptions of their teachers’ use of authentic learning strategies was significantly positively related to greater gains in English/Language Arts as well as Mathematics achievement scores. In addition to students’ perceptions of their own teachers’ use of authentic learning strategies in the classroom, it was also found that schools with higher overall levels of this perception also had greater gains in Mathematics achievement scores. Higher levels of computer use in the classroom were also found to be positively related to gains in students Mathematics achievement scores. In addition, it was found that school-wide levels of quality professional development were also associated with greater gains in students’ Mathematics achievement scores. However, results also revealed that greater use of computer-supported collaborative learning strategies was associated with lower levels of school satisfaction and weaker gains in Mathematics achievement scores. Study 2 examined the relationship of students’ perceptions of their teachers’ use of technology-supported teaching strategies on students’ 21st century learning skills. Results revealed that students’ reports of their teachers’ use of computer-supported collaborative learning strategies was consistently related to lower scores on this measure in the elementary sample (5th grade), but not in the middle school sample (8th grade). Taken together, these findings support several positive impacts of the technology-supported teaching strategies examined, but also highlight the need to investigate technology-related teaching strategies in a more nuanced manner as not all technology-supported teaching strategies necessarily have the positive impacts that have been theorized.

Rights

© 2016, James Siddall

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