Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Department

Educational Studies

First Advisor

Hengtao Tang

Abstract

Effective technology implementation occurs when the technology being used in the classroom provides students the opportunity to collaborate and communicate with each other. Additionally, collaboration is an effective pedagogical strategy for building student digital literacy skills. At East Caraway Valley High School, educators seldom utilize collaborative technologies to further their students’ digital literacy skills. This mixed-methods research study aims to explore educator perceptions about their self-efficacy with collaborative technology integration and the practices of using collaborative technologies in the classroom to identify the reasons for a lack of collaborative technology integration and devise strategies for supporting educators to overcome barriers For this research 53 educators from a suburban high school located within a north-central West Virginian high school participated in the educator survey. Additionally, six educators who completed the educator survey participated in the interview portion of this research study. This study utilized the convergent mixed-methods approach that allowed for all data sets to be collected separately but integrated at the end. Quantitative data was collected from Educator Surveys that assessed educator self-efficacy towards and their practices of using collaborative technology. Qualitative data was collected in form of open-ended survey questions and semi-structured interviews with volunteer educators. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the quantitative data collected from the educator survey. Thematic analysis was leveraged for the qualitative data collected from the open-ended questions on the educator survey and the educator interviews. Additionally, the findings were converged as a means of triangulating the multiple data collection methods used and improving rigor and trustworthiness of the study. This study found that participants reported feeling fairly confident in their self-efficacy (M = 3.19, SD = 1.16). Additionally, participants believe that students’ use of collaborative technology in the classroom is important for building digital literacy skills (M = 3.96, Agree to Strongly Agree, SD = 0.81), with these skills helping students prepare for their future education and profession. These findings deepen the current understanding of how educators perceive the use of collaborative technology to build students' digital literacy skills. Implications from this research study include providing professional development or time to observe, interact with, or learn from peers about integrating new collaborative technologies. Future studies should be conducted to analyze whether the integration of collaborative technology truly builds students' digital literacy skills and to determine if the appropriate digital literacy and workplace skills were acquired.

Rights

© 2026, Bailey Christine Coen Tucker

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