Risk-aversion: understanding teachers’ resistance to technology integration

Upper Secondary School Teachers’ Digital Competence: Analysed by Demographic, Personal and Professional Characteristics

“…Our findings are related more generally to those of Christensen and Knezek (2008), Yuen and Ma (2002), Mumtaz (2000), Sipilä (2013), Howard (2013), Loveless (2011) and Underwood and Dillon (2011), which show that it is often a combination of demographic, personal and professional characteristics that affect teachers' use of ICT in teaching and digital literacy. Our findings complement Ferrari's (2012) analysis of the framework of digital competence in practice.…”

“…Furthermore, they might have no formal ICT education and it might not have been a natural part of their professional development (continuing ICT education). Additionally, even if psychological obstacles, such as technophobia and scepticism, have decreased among teachers over the last decade, we still find some tendencies of this documented in recent studies conducted by Egeberg et al (2012), Howard (2013) and Krumsvik et al (2011). However, while this might be gradually fading away as a barrier in both teacher education and in school, we need more updated research knowledge about this in the years to come.…”

“…This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ often related to teachers' inability to perceive, recognise and utilise the technology's potential in teaching. In Howard's (2013) study the teachers' perceived value of technology in teaching was a challenge and can be related to this distinction, especially to the perceived affordances.…”

“…Cox et al (1999) and Cuban et al (2001) found the same tendencies as well as challenges related to the school management level. Recent studies conducted by Sipilä (2013), Howard (2013), Loveless (2011) and Underwood and Dillon (2011) show that teachers' use of ICT in teaching can represent a number of new opportunities as well as a number of challenges (which are also related to a lack of digital competence 3 ). One assumption that is shared by several different positions and studies dealing with digital literacy and ICT in teaching is that teachers' digital competence is more complex than digital literacy in other occupations and among average citizens.…”

“…This apparent reluctance to make use of educational technology might be due to technophobia, scepticism or other reasons (Somekh, 2008). Recently, Howard (2013) found that teachers' scepticism to integrate educational technology in classroom teaching is influenced by negative affective responses to technology, general risk-aversion in teaching and the perceived value of technology in teaching. At the same time, experiences from the practice field show that there are also teachers who are 'frontrunners' in the use of educational technology who seem to possess a high level of digital competence.…”