Teachers’ attitudes toward technology integration in schools: a four‐year study

Abstract

This trend study was designed to examine a current trend and pattern, as well as a development of teachers’ concerns about technology integration in the curriculum. The study was conducted by repeated cross‐sectional studies, applying the same research instrument to different samples of subjects at different points, over a period of four years during 2004–07. Two hundred and seventy‐five in‐service teachers in two graduate courses participated in the study at a Midwestern public university in the USA. The Stages of Concerns (SoC) Questionnaire was used to assess teachers’ seven stages of concern: Awareness, Informational, Personal, Management, Consequence, Collaboration, and Refocusing. This study found patterns of concern typical for teachers at different levels of their professional development as well as distinct and stable differences between technology user sub‐groups over four years. Specifically, (1) teachers’ concern profile as a whole were very intense in the stages of Informational, Personal, and Refocusing; (2) there were statistical significant differences in concern profile among teachers with three levels of perceptions of their technology implementation status; and (3) the concern profile for each of the three user groups did not support Hall, George, and Rutherford’s hypothesis of 1977 regarding the development of concern profiles for the three different user groups. International implications for teachers’ technology integration are discussed.