Policy Implementation and Teacher Cognition: ICT in Education in Hong Kong Secondary Schools

The implementation process has hitherto remained largely implicit in the research of education policy. Recent research on how policy does and does not get implemented has developed explanations with assumptions rest on rational-choice foundation that implementers respond to the policy that is intended. This study suggests viewing implementation gap as neglect of the complexity of the human sensemaking processes consequential to implementation. This study argues that policy implementation of ICT in education could be viewed as policy learning where knowledge is built and created during the implementation process for change in cognitive schema. Drawing on the cognitive frames, this study aims at exploring the relationship between policy implementation and teacher cognition to investigate how teachers in two Hong Kong secondary schools internalize the policy of ICT in education. The process of implementation is explored with emphasis on the interaction among individual teachers, the policy of ICT in education and implementation sites where teachers interact with system elements. Building upon the research findings and the cognitive framework of sensemaking, this study puts forth a five-phase cognitive framework of individual sensemaking, in which ICT policy implementation is more than just technical skill acquisition, involving teachers' cognitive attributes to internalize the policy by embodying explicit knowledge into tacit knowledge and by attributing into the cognitive structures with knowledge building and knowledge creation for conceptual reorganization. The policy implementation is unveiled from individual to community of practice whilst externalizing individual tacit knowledge to organizational explicit knowledge resulted from policy change to change in cognitive schema.