Information and Communications Technologies Support for 21st-century Teaching: An International Analysis

Abstract

Beginning in the 1990s, national educational policies around the world have mandated massive investments in information and communications technologies (ICT) to transform teaching and learning in ways appropriate for developing “21st-century skills.” Recent research indicates significant success in bringing teachers and students into contact with ICT in many national education systems; however, significant challenge remains in integrating ICT into the pedagogical practices aimed at developing 21st-century skills. This article inquires into one commonly cited obstacle to pedagogical change around ICT: school-based support. Using data from the 2006 Second Information Technology in Education Study survey, we investigated whether the availability of school-level support for 21st-century skills teaching activities predicted the increased use of ICT in conjunction with those 21st-century teaching activities in the classroom. We studied 18 national education systems and found that in only three—namely, South Africa, the Russian Federation, and Thailand—was school-based support for ICT use in 21st-century teaching activities consistently associated with the odds of using ICT on such activities. These counterintuitive findings are interpreted against the literature framing the inquiry.