Teacher roles and pupil outcomes in technology-rich early literacy learning

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This dissertation focused on involvement of kindergarten teachers in curriculum (design and) implementation of PictoPal activities. PictoPal refers to ICT-rich on- and off-computer activities for early literacy. Teachers in this study were involved in three different roles: executor-only, re-designer, and co-designer. In the executor-only role teachers were not involved in design, they implemented ready-made PictoPal activities in their classes. The re-designer and co-designer roles involved teams of teachers in a purposeful act of adjusting, respectively designing new ICT-rich activities and materials and implementing them. The research question guiding this study was: “Which teacher role (executor-only, re-designer, or co-designer) contributes most to the effectiveness of an ICT-rich learning environment for early literacy?”. To address this question four different case studies were executed using a case-study approach. Each case study focused on a particular teacher role. A cross-case analysis was applied in the fourth study to compare three different cases with each other on a common set of measures: teacher perceptions about their role, curriculum practicality, co-ownership, integration of on- and off-computer activities, and pupil learning. The findings of this study showed that each teacher role (executor-only, re-designer, and co-designer) contributes significantly to the effectiveness of ICT-rich early literacy learning activities. Significant differences in integration of the on- and off-computer activities were found between the three teacher roles. Teachers as co-designers showed highest extent of integration. Across teacher roles, pupil learning outcomes were not straightforwardly related to the extent of integration. However, teachers as co-designers felt a sense of co-ownership towards PictoPal, which yielded high degrees of integration and willingness to extend implementation of PictoPal beyond the research context. Based on this study, it can be recommended that schools who wish to support early literacy development in kindergarteners can benefit from engaging their teachers in collaborative design of ICT-rich activities.