Understanding What Administrators See as Barriers to the Adoption of Technology for Learning and Intervention Measures to Overcome the Barriers
A Master of Business Administration Thesis
University of Phoenix, 1996by David S. Bail
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Contents
Executive Summary
The degree of adoption of technology for learning in the Riverside Unified School District did not reach the goal set forth in the 1990 Strategic Plan that "Technology shall be adopted in the instructional and operational programs of the district." Changes in RUSD's resources and demographics were reviewed along with the Strategic Plan, which was developed to address the performance gap arising from those changes. The district's Technology Plan and Implementation Plan were discussed, and the district's and the nation's current technology status examined. Similar shortfalls in attainment of the goal of adoption of technology for learning were reported in other districts and in other states.
Cultural and economic changes as well as changes in worldview and its relationship to the coming of the Information Age were revealed as underlying the perceived need for educational reform, as were social evolution and the need for meaning to organize a philosophy for our existence. The "global village" requires "global citizens" who will be assisted in learning by teachers in the role of "knowledge navigators." The demand for educational reform to prepare graduates for a changed world was discussed along with studies showing the use of technology for educational reform.
Given that technology has been shown to be useful for educational reform for learning, and that such educational reform is called for because of social changes for which students must be prepared, the question becomes one of how technology might be successfully adopted for learning in schools. Technology should not be purchased "to perform smokestack tasks." The teaching of knowledge divided into isolated subject areas is seen to be as much at an end as discrete isolated jobs in the world of work.
Past successes were seen to often make it more difficult to succeed in the future. Change was reported to start with an examination of philosophy and belief systems. Complex change was reported to require many committed people working cooperatively and insightfully together for solutions. Collaborative skills and relationships were seen as imperative to be able to learn and to continue to learn what is needed to be a change agent for societal improvement. Significant change was seen as unlikely without investment in adult learning systems. Preparing employees to take advantage of the new systems was the subject of one study advocating investing sufficiently in human resource development and "cultural cultivation."
Through the Office of Technology Assessment, teachers were reported as believing that the barriers to technology use consist largely of lack of available time, lack of information on appropriate curricular use of technology, lack of assessment aligned with the new learning, lack of technical support and advice, and lack of upkeep and repair. In order to identify any similarities and differences between teachers' points of view and administrators' points of view, this research was intended to identify what administrators see as the barriers to that adoption and intervention measures that might be undertaken to overcome the barriers.
Fundamental instructional reform and "associated development of new collaborative cultures among educators" were seen as the primary focus of school reform, to which the use of technology should be tied. The district's educational goals should be the drivers for the goals and objectives for computer use, technology needs and applications. "Twisting restructuring and technology to fit the Industrial Age of the past" will cause them not to affect educational practice. Only restructuring and technology driven by "challenging goals for students and supported by long term commitments to change and investment in human resources" will increase school productivity and societal productivity. Education is a societal institution dedicated to helping people learn to deal with change in their lifetimes. As such, education has a moral purpose to develop a "change capacity" and to "produce critical thinkers and problem solvers for continuous improvement in the self-renewing society." This shared vision should be developed through a "dynamic interaction between organizational members and leaders."
Innovations were seen as not becoming lasting without a "rather significant role from leaders." Change was also seen to be affected by other factors such as communications and decisionmaking "facilitating the discovery of an innovation's essential features." Change was viewed as a negotiated process where the "dissident voice" functions as the "jewel of change," spotlighting problems needing solution prior to further advancement. The identification of a sense of urgency, as perhaps through a performance gap, was seen as the starting point for a change process. Forming a powerful guiding coalition, creating and communicating a vision, and empowering others to act on that vision, were reported as steps for successful change. Additionally, planning for and creating short term "wins," consolidating improvements and following up with further advances, and institutionalizing the new approaches, were operationalizing steps recommended to bring the change home, along with a "conscious attempt" to show "how approaches, behaviors and attitudes have helped improve performance," closing the expectations gap.
Change was categorized as being adaptive or generative learning. Adaptation was learning that added to the "knowledge base of competencies or routines without fundamentally altering the firm" while generative learning "questions and modifies" the organization's "norms, processes, policies and objectives." Scientific examples were provided, such as DNA which allows an organism to adapt to its surroundings while still maintaining most of its characteristics and evolution which involves sudden, radical change to adapt to new circumstances, and members of the animal kingdom such as ducks and ants who pursue their individual goals yet collaborate through consonance of their individual and group goals. Catalysts were described that appear when chaos threatens to overcome the old order, forcing the original system to "reorganize to a more efficient stage in order to survive." Cognitive dissonance, expectancy theory, equity theory, and superordinate goals are ways in which humans can work together for change. Synergy was described as the situation when each individual element of the system is working toward its own very individual goals but the elements are functioning in spontaneously mutually supportive ways. "When elements of a synergistic system support each other, they support the system as a whole, and the performance of the whole is improved." Adaptation and evolution are the creative response of a system to its changing environment; evolution occurs as systems change over time.
Scientific, economic and marketing theories were reported describing growth and change in populations, even exponential growth, as ultimately reaching "limits of growth structures." The sigmoid curve was presented as a representation of such growth in populations or their characteristics as well as product and industry life cycles. "The secret to constant growth," it was reported, "is to start a new sigmoid curve before the old one peters out." Advice was given to start this second curve when the first curve was still increasing, despite the confusion and conflict that would result from allocation of time and attention between the two curves. The difficulty of starting the new curve after the peak of the old curve had passed, after resources were diminishing, was made evident. A retreat from the bureaucratic stage of the organizational life cycle to the condition of "prime" was advocated by cultivating the entrepreneuerial spirit, customer focus, product focus, and nourishment of early successes. Being in any organizational lifecycle stage other than prime was seen as being a condition to be avoided through prevention, or as a pathology to be treated by intervention. Such a circumstance was seen as being entirely reversible. Continuance of the bureaucratic stage was seen as leading inexorably to organizational death. Rather than pushing the object of change so much that resistance builds, identification and reduction of the factors limiting growth and change were advocated. The necessity of a product champion--a committed leader--and a willing marketplace and a workable business plan, were reported as being necessary factors for a successful product launch.
A review of the literature in the fields of change, the diffusion of innovation, and the stages of concern model (as known descriptors for barriers in the educational change process), found no studies focusing on the application of organizational learning theory, corporate lifecycle stages theory, and natural science and social psychology models to the change process, barriers to change, or intervention methods to accelerate the adoption of technology for learning. Consequently it was determined that a survey of school district administrators should be conducted and the data analyzed to determine if these theories and models could affect the adoption of technology for learning.
An exploratory study of the factors underlying administrators' attitudes toward the use of technology for instruction was designed to investigate the proposition that seven factors accounted for a large majority of the variance in their attitudes, which could be barriers to the adoption of technology for instruction. The factors are: the administrator's degree of personal technology acceptance or use; the administrator's degree of focus on the learner's learning opportunities as the center of their efforts; their assessment of their own and their district's and their community's belief in the value of educational use of technology as a reform; their self-assessment of their degree of freedom to innovate for instruction; the degree to which they have developed and communicated a shared vision on the educational use of technology; and their assessment of the adequacy of their own resource infrastructure.
Questions were developed for a survey which would probe those areas: the adoption of innovations model and stages of concerns; the lifecycle stages of organizations model, restructuring and reforms such as "instructionism" versus constructivism; the learning organizations model and transformational leadership theory; and literature from field work in actual instructional technology implementation. The two open-ended questions were intended to elicit whether there would be narrative responses indicating conditions such as the necessity of a climate granting permission to innovate and improve, the necessity of a knowledge of how to use technology successfully in instruction, and the availability of resource infrastructure as important intervention measures, to accelerate successful adoption.
Given that technology has been shown to be useful for educational reform for learning, and that such educational reform is called for because of social changes for which students must be prepared, the question became one of how technology might be successfully adopted for learning in schools. The questions for this research were:
- What do administrators see as the variables
that serve as barriers to the use of technology for learning
in K-12 public school districts; and
- Of the variables that serve as barriers to the use of technology, which can be controlled by the district and altered to improve the use of technology?
The alternative hypothesis was that variables exist which influence the degree of the adoption of technology for learning in the Riverside Unified School District and in K-12 public school districts, and that those variables could be altered and other intervention measures taken as well to hasten the degree of adoption. The null hypothesis was that no variables would be found to exist which influence the degree of the adoption of technology for learning, and that no intervention measures would be found to exist which could accelerate the rate of adoption.
The research confirmed that variables and factors do exist which influence the adoption of technology for learning, and that those variables, factors and conditions could be altered to hasten the degree of adoption. The null hypothesis was rejected and the alternate hypothesis was adopted.
Cultural and economic changes underlay the perceived need for educational reform, along with changes in worldview and the coming of the Information Age. The public as customer demands educational reform to prepare graduates for a changed world. Education as an industry seems to be undergoing a reengineering process as it refocuses on the needs of the customer and the most effective ways to fulfill those needs. The current efforts of reform and restructuring, particularly those centered on constructivism, seem to be aligning learning methodology with students' learning skills. Technology is not the change--technology is the instrumentality of the change.
The management problem of discovering what administrators saw as barriers to the adoption of technology for learning and what intervention measures might be taken to overcome the barriers was the focus of the literature review and the subsequent survey. Components of the problem which also serve as intervention measures were found to be:
- Having a moral purpose for societal improvement; vision and leadership
- Institutionalizing innovation; transformational leadership and inclusiveness
- Using learning organization principles; practicing adaptive and generative change
- Using biologic and social science principles for transformational change
- Using marketing and economic principles to ascertain where the organization is on the product lifecycle curve
These biologic, social science, marketing, economic, and corporate lifecycle stages points of view were found to be lacking in the existing literature on the adoption of technology for learning and stages of concern models. Believing them to be significant in identifying barriers and serving as intervention measures to overcome the barriers, a survey of school district instructional administrators was undertaken. Use of technology for learning as an educational reform is an important moral purpose which can serve as a motivation for administrators pursuing a successful change effort.
Factors were found that affect the variability of the dependent variables and the null hypothesis was rejected. Planned future increased use of technology for learning is a dependent variable measuring attainment of a condition or Stage of Concern that has a negative correlation with having developed a shared vision or Workable Business Plan, indicating that this is an earlier stage of adoption. The degree to which the computers are networked, as an dependent variable, had a correlation with having a shared vision or Workable Business Plan, as well as the availability of current funds and the current number of students per computer - in other words, when there were more computers and fewer students for each computer, the extent of networking reported was greater, as in a later stage of adoption. The primary dependent variables are the quantity of computers accessible for learning expressed as the number of students per computer and the hours per day computers are used for learning. The factors influencing the variability of the dependent variables are from the Adoption of Innovations and Stages of Concern model, the Learning Organizations and Transformational Leadership model, and the Instructional Technology Implementation Literature model.
Factors were seen to underlay the conditions favoring the adoption of technology. The factors influencing the variability of the conditions include the Adoption of Innovations and Stages of Concern model, the Reforms and Restructuring model, the Learning Organizations and Transformational Leadership model, the Lifecycle Stages of Organizations model, and the Instructional Technology Implementation Literature model.
The existence of a Willing Marketplace is a condition which exists prior to the development of the shared vision or Workable Business Plan. The communication of that shared vision by a Committed Leader requires that the shared vision first exist. The survey showed that factors from the lifecycle stages of organizations model, the learning organizations and transformational leadership model, and the reforms and restructuring model were found to be present and effective in reports of attaining the adoption of technology for learning, thereby providing tools in addition to previously published reports reporting factors from the adoptions of innovations and stages of concern model and the instructional technology implementation literature model.
Recommendations to management were made, including the fact that management must embrace this change robustly, forging forward into the disruption and the uncertainty, acknowledging customer demands and undertaking the changes needed to fulfill them. Internally it may be believed that the status quo is still acceptable and working, but the marketplace perceives that the product is mature and in need of revitalization. Committed leaders must develop shared visions, workable business plans, developed inclusively and relying on reengineered learning processes underpinned by adequate staff development in the instructional use of technology, adequate technology selection support, adequate technology repair, and adequate funding for all of it. Once developed, this shared vision, this workable business plan, must be communicated widely and shepherded through to accomplishment, including necessary revisions along its course - which will extend over numerous years.
