Understanding What Administrators See as Barriers to the Adoption of Technology for Learning and Intervention Measures to Overcome the Barriers by David S. Bail [This article has been divided into a number of separate web pages for browser-loading ease. You may view (and select) the contents by section title from the Contents, or click on the "Next" button at the bottom of each page.] Appendices   FORMAL BUSINESS RESEARCH PROPOSAL 1. Problem Statement/Purpose Problem Statement The 1990 Strategic Plan of the Riverside Unified School District, as written by the community (school board and volunteer community members, parents, teachers, students, managers and staff who are members of the Strategic Planning Committee) announced a strategy that, "Technology shall be adopted in the instructional and operational programs of the district." The deviation from the expected performance level is that the Riverside Unified School District, California and many other states is not using technology to the extent envisioned by that strategy (Main and Roberts, 1990, Preston, 1989, and Mandel, Melcher, Yang and McNamee, 1995). Research Purpose The research purpose of this study is to address the management problem of discovering what administrators think are the barriers to the adoption of technology for learning in the Riverside Unified School District. The management purpose of this study is to discover what are the intervention measures that can be taken to accelerate this adoption. The working hypothesis is that the rapidity with which technology will be adopted by a school or school district is a factor of a combination of factors: change theory, the diffusion of innovation model, stages of concern model, corporate lifecycle stage theory, learning theory, and even principals from the natural sciences such as physics and animal behavior. While a great deal of literature exists on the subjects of change, and particularly the adoption of technological change, most research on these topics appears to be based on the Diffusion of Innovation work (Rogers, 1962) or the stages of concern or concerns based adoption model (Hall and Loucks, 1979). This research proposes to examine the relationship of change or the resistance to change from the standpoint of corporate lifecycle stage theory, as well as developing diagnostic and prescriptive tools to assess the barriers to change and intervention measures to accelerate it. 2. Background The Riverside Unified School District (RUSD) is a public kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12) school district located in Riverside County, California. Ninety-five square miles in size, it serves two-thirds of the City of Riverside as well as the unincorporated communities of Highgrove, Woodcrest, and Mockingbird Canyon. With 34,500 K-12 students, 4,500 adult students (completing high school graduation), 3,000 employees, thirty-eight schools, 550 acres and 2.5 million square feet of buildings, the district is the largest in Riverside County and the thirteenth largest public school district in California. Believing that perhaps schools as then constituted were felt by the larger community to be neither effective nor relevant, and as an effort to reach out so that the community would feel a higher degree of commitment to and ownership of the schools, RUSD formed a Strategic Planning Committee consisting of parents, community members, students, and staff to "chart the future of Riverside Unified School District as it enters the decade of the nineties and beyond." Completed on October 24, 1990, the Plan contained ten strategies directed at making schools more effective, relevant, and reflective of community desires. One of the strategies involves greater use of technology (RUSD, 1990). Although computer technology entered schools as long as thirty years ago, the dream of having vast resources of knowledge readily available to students for learning is less real than the reality of most computers being used for a few hours per day (Wallis, 1995). While the Riverside Unified School District's Technology Plan goal has been that "the classroom computer should be a window to the world" (Northrop, in RUSD, 1993), the reality is that most school computers continue to be used at best for applications such as word processing, spreadsheets, data bases, or CD ROM drivers (National School Boards Association, 1995), or at worst for "drill and kill" thousand-dollar electronic worksheets or flashcards, as opposed to means for allowing children to create meaning (Papert, 1993). Approximately two-thirds of America's schools have some sort of access to the Internet, but only about three percent of classrooms have access (U.S. Department of Education Press Release, February 3, 1995). In a recent survey, one computer for every five pupils is the median goal for many school principals, but so far the actual average for all public schools in 1993 is one computer for every 19.2 pupils; a third of those polled also want five or more computers per classroom, but that is the case in only 7.4 percent of the schools in the survey. In that survey, 47.5 percent of the schools had classrooms without phones, making modem use for online services impossible. Furthermore, the greatest numbers of classroom computers in classrooms and administrative offices are stand-alone machines, not networked - either by Local Area Network (LAN) or Wide Area Network (WAN) - in any way (Valeriano, 1995). 3. Research Questions 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. The questions for this research are:   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? 4. Scope This research has been based upon a survey of assistant superintendents of forty-six K-12 public school districts in California (including the instructional administration of RUSD), and 324 school districts across the United States that are members of the National School Boards Association's Technology and Learning Network, as a sample intended to represent the administrators of the more technologically advanced segment of the 15,360 public school districts across the United States, and a comparison survey of a group of 101 classroom teachers of RUSD. 5. Methodology The survey instrument will be constructed so that each respondent may chose an answer to each question corresponding to his agreement with a statement. The questionnaire will consist of two open-ended narrative response items and thirty-five items to which the subjects could respond on a 4-point Likert-type scale, examples of which follow: I believe that students must be taught the basics above all else My district believes that students must be taught the basics above all else I believe that children should take all the necessary time to learn to construct meaning and knowledge My district is centered on students above all other considerations My district is innovative and willing to take risk for instructional improvement over the long haul My district is concerned for evaluating impacts of proposals on scarce resources above all else My district is bound by restrictive controls to the point of sacrificing the possibility of new movement What would influence you to increase its use sooner? (Narrative) What do you see as the most appropriate uses of instructional technology? (Narrative) The sample will be deliberately non-randomly selected because per se it represents districts thought likely to be further along the road toward the adoption of technology for learning and therefore more likely to have identified any barriers that exist and any intervention measures that accelerate adoption. Further, obviously the non-random selection of the fifty teachers from Riverside Unified School District high- and low-technology adoption schools cannot be thought to be representative of the population of 2.43 million public school teachers in the United States, but the thought is that their viewpoints could add a small taste of practitioner's flavor to this study of administration to ascertain any similarities or differences of perception. Regression analysis of the data will be conducted. Each item on the returned surveys will be analyzed for its correlation with the factor being measured and the hypothesis being tested, and a covariance analysis between factors will also conducted to be sure none were mutually dependent. A confidence level of ninety-five percent was accepted as the measure of acceptance or rejection of each hypothesis. Correlation and regression were chosen because they are the methods appropriate to indicate and gauge causality and by which prediction of future effects can be made. 6. Possible Findings It is anticipated that the findings will show that there are organizational lifecycle stage issues and learning organizations issues which must be favorable before adoption of technology is accomplished for learning. It is anticipated that these organizational lifecycle stage issues and learning organizations issues--such as openness of the organization to possible experimentation and change, not being bound by overly restrictive procedures and bureaucratic restrictions, having the entrepreneuerial spirit to seek product improvements for customer satisfaction, and working colloaboratively, mutually developing shared visions that are communicated by committed leaders--will pre-exist the presence or absence of availability of funding and training and support before and after the as factors determining that technology will be used. It is further posited that once sufficient favorable organizational lifecycle stage and learning organization conditions exist, motivation will then be potent enough to "find" the means to expedite adoption. As a result, it is anticipated that the study will find that the implications for business decisions concerning the adoption of technology for use in learning in the Riverside Unified School District are that the focus must first fall on the promotion of favorable organizational lifecycle stage and learning organization conditions as antecedent to that adoption. COVER LETTER May 21, 1995 Dear Colleague: This survey has been designed to elicit the facts in technologically advanced districts across the United States. Your assistance is requested in gathering information which can be of use in an effort to find out what administrators think are the barriers to the adoption of technology for learning and what intervention measures are available to accelerate the intervention. The completion time is estimated to be five minutes. As a fellow school administrator, and as an MBA student completing the requirements of my degree program, I thank you. Please have this survey completed by the person who performs duties for your district as chief instructional officer, and return the completed survey in the enclosed stamped, self-addressed envelope by June 15, 1995, to: David S. Bail Associate Superintendent, Business and Governmental Relations Riverside Unified School District 3380 14th Street Riverside CA 92501 Thank you for your time and effort to gather the facts. Sincerely, David S. Bail SURVEY "What do administrators think are the barriers to the use of technology for learning?" and, "What intervention measures can accelerate that use?" Those are the questions this survey is designed to answer. Your time and effort to complete this survey are greatly appreciated and important. Naturally your individual answers will be kept confidential, and will be used only for statistical data for illuminating barriers and accelerating access of students to technology. 1. Use of technology is an experiment: Strongly Disagree ____ Disagree ____ Agree ____ Strongly Agree ____ 2. Use of computers in instruction creates too many problems: Strongly Disagree ____ Disagree ____ Agree ____ Strongly Agree ____ 3. Computers are too complicated to use: Strongly Disagree ____ Disagree ____ Agree ____ Strongly Agree ____ 4. I do not want to use a computer: Strongly Disagree ____ Disagree ____ Agree ____ Strongly Agree ____ 5. I use a computer: Not at all ____ Only Word Processing ____ Word Processing and one other application ____ Word Processing, E Mail or Online Services, and one or more other applications ____ 6. Computer use should be encouraged by my district: Strongly Disagree ____ Disagree ____ Agree ____ Strongly Agree ____ 7. Using computers adds motivational interest to classroom lessons: Strongly Disagree ____ Disagree ____ Agree ____ Strongly Agree ____ 8. There are districts that I respect that are successfully using technology for learning: Strongly Disagree ____ Disagree ____ Agree ____ Strongly Agree ____ 9. I believe that students must be taught the basics above all else: Strongly Disagree ____ Disagree ____ Agree ____ Strongly Agree ____ 10. My district believes that students must be taught the basics above all else: Strongly Disagree ____ Disagree ____ Agree ____ Strongly Agree ____ 11. I believe that children should take all the necessary time to learn to construct meaning and knowledge: Strongly Disagree ____ Disagree ____ Agree ____ Strongly Agree ____ 12. My district believes that children should take all the necessary time to learn to construct meaning and knowledge: Strongly Disagree ____ Disagree ____ Agree ____ Strongly Agree ____ 13. My district can choose what it wants to emphasize in curriculum: Strongly Disagree ____ Disagree ____ Agree ____ Strongly Agree ____ 14. The community climate of my district allows experiments: Strongly Disagree ____ Disagree ____ Agree ____ Strongly Agree ____ 15. The internal climate of my district allows experiments: Strongly Disagree ____ Disagree ____ Agree ____ Strongly Agree ____ 16. I am "OK" if an experiment fails: Strongly Disagree ____ Disagree ____ Agree ____ Strongly Agree ____ 17. My district is centered on learning regardless of consequences: Strongly Disagree ____ Disagree ____ Agree ____ Strongly Agree ____ 18. My district is willing to take rational risks for instructional improvement over the long haul: Strongly Disagree ____ Disagree ____ Agree ____ Strongly Agree ____ 19. My district evaluates impacts of proposals on scarce resources above all else: Strongly Disagree ____ Disagree ____ Agree ____ Strongly Agree ____ 20. My district is bound by restrictive controls to the point of sacrificing the possibility of new movement: Strongly Disagree ____ Disagree ____ Agree ____ Strongly Agree ____ 21. My discretionary funds are: None ____ A small amount ____ Some ____ Comfortable ____ 22. I get support for timely and effective equipment repair for instructional technology: Strongly Disagree ____ Disagree ____ Agree ____ Strongly Agree ____ 23. It is possible for me to get support for timely and effective equipment repair for instructional technology: Strongly Disagree ____ Disagree ____ Agree ____ Strongly Agree ____ 24. We have developed a shared vision of the integration of technology into instruction: Strongly Disagree ____ Disagree ____ Agree ____ Strongly Agree ____ 25. I have widely communicated that shared vision of the integration of technology into instruction: Strongly Disagree ____ Disagree ____ Agree ____ Strongly Agree ____ 26. We are clear on the use of technology as a tool for increased learning, not as an add- on: Strongly Disagree ____ Disagree ____ Agree ____ Strongly Agree ____ 27. The instructional computers in my district are: stand-alone models ____ networked on-site only ____ networked on-site and district-wide ____ networked on-site, district-wide and to the outside world ____ 28. Instructional computers in my district are used by students: Elementary -- Middle -- High Less than two hours per day ____ ____ ____Two hours to three hours per day ____ ____ ____ Three hours to four hours per day ____ ____ ____ More than four hours per day ____ ____ ____ 29. I make sure that principals and teachers get support for assistance in selecting technology for instruction: Strongly Disagree ____ Disagree ____ Agree ____ Strongly Agree ____ 30. I make decisions that give support for staff development for the use of instructional technology: Strongly Disagree ____ Disagree ____ Agree ____ Strongly Agree ____ 31. I need more training about instructional technology: Strongly Disagree ____ Disagree ____ Agree ____ Strongly Agree ____ 32. My ratio of students to each instructional computer is: More than 30 to 0ne ____ Between 29 and 19 to One ____ Between 18 and 9 to One ____ Less than 9 to One ____ 33. I plan on increasing the use of instructional technology: This year ____ Within next two years ____ Beyond two years ____ Unknown ____ 34. What would influence you to increase its use sooner? (Narrative) 35. What do you see as the most appropriate uses of instructional technology? (Narrative) Please describe the size of your district: Under 5,000 students ____ 5,000 to 29,999 students ____ 30,000 to 59,999 students ____ Over 60,000 students ____ Please indicate the title which best describes your function: Superintendent ____ Assistant Superintendent, Instruction ____ Curriculum Manager ____ Principal ____ Teacher ____ Other (Please describe) ____   Please return your completed survey by June 15, 1995, in the enclosed stamped self-addressed envelope to: David S. Bail Associate Superintendent, Business and Governmental Relations Riverside Unified School District 3380 14th Street Riverside CA 92501 Thank you for your time and assistance in completing this survey. Your opinions are valuable and your answers will be used to bring light to the questions of what administrators think are barriers to the use of technology for learning and what intervention measures accelerate its use. Sincerely, David S. Bail