Technology integration barriers: Turkish social studies teachers’ perspectives

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday IV)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Teachers and curriculum in schools

Proposal

The purpose of this study is to investigate technology integration related issues among Turkish middle school social studies teachers. The researchers administrated a 34-item survey to 171 middle school social studies teachers in Turkey. The findings indicated that the most highly identified barriers were external obstacles such as a lack of technology, restricted Internet access, and a lack of administrative and technical support. Moreover, a significant difference existed between teachers who attended technology-related professional development sessions and those who did not.

Introduction
In the last 20 years, Turkey has invested nearly four billion dollars to provide information and communication technology (ICT) to schools and to train teachers in integrating ICT into the curriculum. In 1998, the Turkish government designed a nationwide project supported by the World Bank to provide hardware and software for the schools and to train teachers for information and communication technology-based learning (Özdemir & Kiliç, 2007; Tarman, Baytak, & Duman, 2015). The last ICT-based project conducted by the Turkish National Ministry of Education (NME) was called the “Movement to Increase Opportunities and Improve Technology,” otherwise referred to as the FATİH Project. Through this project, the NME equipped 40,000 schools and 620,000 classrooms across Turkey with Interactive White Boards, tablet computers, and Internet network infrastructure (ERG & RTI International, 2013). In this context, the purpose of this paper is to investigate obstacles that Turkish social studies teachers face while they are trying to integrate ICT in the teaching-learning process.

Method

Participants
Participants of the study were selected through cluster random sampling during the 2015-2016 academic year of middle schools. The authors first determined the geographical areas of interest and chose the western part of Turkey. Then, middle schools were randomly selected to reach social studies teachers. The authors visited some of the selected schools and personally invited social studies teachers to participate the study while others were contacted via email. A total of 171 surveys were returned of the 259 distributed.
Data Collection and Analysis
The researchers developed and used the “Barriers in Teaching with Technology” survey for data collection. The scale has 34 items (on the scale of 1 – 5) and two dimensions: internal barriers and external barriers. The Cronbach’s alpha internal consistency coefficient was calculated for the whole scale and was found to be .889. In addition, the internal consistency coefficient of each dimension was calculated and was found to be .87 for external obstacles and .85 for internal obstacles. The data were analyzed through descriptive analysis, an independent sample t-test, and a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) in the SPSS 20 statistical package program. The α = 0.05 significance level was taken as the basis for significance test between groups.


Results
Table 1 shows the responses of the social studies teachers for the selected items.
Table 1.
Insert table 1

The result showed that 99 of social studies teachers (57.9%) attended Professional Development (PD) training related to technology integration and while 72 of the social studies teachers (42.1%) did not have such an opportunity. The test was significant (t(169) = -3.303, p = .001) for the external obstacles dimension. Teachers that not attend PD related to technology integration perceived external barriers as obstacles for technology integration. A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted to evaluate whether teachers’ ideas about barriers in teaching with technology differ by teaching experience. The independent variable, teaching experience included four levels: 1-5 years, 6-10 years, 11-15 years, and 16 or more years. The ANOVA was significant for the external obstacles dimension, F(3,167) = 6.10, p = 0.001. The results revealed that a significant difference existed regarding the ideas of teachers about external barriers in teaching with technology relative to their teaching experiences. New teachers (M1-5 = 69. 26) considered external factors as more likely to create obstacles to the integration of technology into the teaching-learning process than did more experienced teachers (M6-10 = 60.93, M11-15 = 61.15, M16+ = 59.19). A follow-up test was conducted to evaluate pairwise differences among means. The Scheffe tests indicated that no difference existed among teachers with 6-10 years, 11-15 years, and 16 years or more of experiences; however, a significant difference existed between new teachers (1-5 years of experience) and the older groups of teachers on ideas about the external obstacles dimension.
Conclusion
This study found that the most highly identified barriers were mainly external obstacles such as the lack of an effective computer lab. This result is somewhat surprising because, according the National Ministry of Education, approximately 40,000 schools and 620,000 classrooms across Turkey were equipped with ICT hardware (Kilinc et al., 2016; Kilinc & Dere, 2013; Mauch & Tarman, 2016). Despite the prevalence of ICT in classrooms, especially Interactive White Boards (Smart Boards), Turkish social studies teachers believe that computer labs are barriers. Similar with previous research (Hoffmann, 2017; Wachira & Keengwe, 2011), the scheduling of the computer lab usage to meet the goal of technology integration for teachers remains a key obstacle for social studies teachers in this current study. The results agree with previous studies (Carver, 2016; Korkmaz & Avci, 2016; Nikolayeva & Pak, 2017; Ogurlu & Sevim, 2017; Salehi & Salehi, 2012; Schul, 2017; Waters & Russell, 2017), which maintained that teachers perceived a lack of hardware and restricted access to the Internet as barriers for technology integration.
Professional development about technology integration into the curriculum is an essential component of promoting the use of technology during the teaching-learning process (Darling-Hammond, Wei, Andree, Richardson, & Orphanos, 2009; Kilinc, 2017). However, professional development activities sometimes can be perceived as an obstacle for technology integration when they are unrelated to actual classroom practices or are focused solely on technical skills (Kopcha, 2012; Mouza, 2009; Tarman, 2017; Tarman & Chigisheva, 2017; Wells, 2007). Another study in the US also indicated that the lack of necessary knowledge and skill is an obstacle to integrate technology in the classroom (Mackenzie, 2013). Indeed, Turkish social studies teachers agreed that the professional development courses that they attended were irrelevant to their needs for integrating technology. As several scholars have mentioned (Kilinc, 2016; Tarman, 2016; Yigit & Tarman, 2016; Tarman & Kuran, 2015), teachers perceived insufficient technology-related professional developments as a main barrier for technology integration.

Authors

• Emin Kilic, Independent Scholar

• Bulent Tarman, Independent Scholar

• Hasan Aydin, Florida Gulf Coast University