A Survey On ICT Leadership In Primary And Secondary Schools In Shanxi Province

Since 1990 s, Information and Communication Technology(ICT) has been developing at an astonishing speed and widely affected the life in different areas. In the domain of education, the significance of ICT has been acknowledged and gradually utilized in schooling. The application of ICT in education has brought a lot of positive changes in schools. However, there are also some problems and challenges by using of ICT in schooling.Facing the challenge and opportunity by ICT, actions have been taken internationally. In order to assure the effectively use of ICT in schooling by school principals and related administrators, Britain government issued a national standard "Principal National standards"(1998) to guide the leadership behaviors of school principals and other administrators. As its counterpart, US government also released it’s a national policy document “NETS?A-2009”. In recent decade, Chinese government has highlighted the importance of ICT in education. In 2012, "Ten Year Development Plans on the Education Informationization(2011-2020)" was formulated to guide the development of educational informationization in China. Currently there is an increasing discussion on educational informationalization, however, there is a lack of exploration on ICT leadership in primary and secondary schools in China. As the key element of school leadership, the ICT leadership of school principals plays crucial role in leading the effectively use of ICT in schooling in primary and secondary schools. Empirical studies are therefore needed to explore how school principals construct their ICT leadership in current educational context in China.Drawing upon the constructs from related literature on ICT leadership and school leadership, this study develops a conceptual framework including two broad themes and four sub-dimensions. The two themes are: 1) personal leadership capability of ICT leadership of principals; 2) interactive process of ICT leadership of principals. The four sub-dimensions are: principals’ information literacy and management ability, the integration of ICT and "teaching and learning", school information environment construction and school information development vision and planning. This study contends that ICT leadership of school principals involves the personal leadership of school principals and the interaction influential process between school principals and related stakeholders in which integration of ICT with teaching and learning, vision highlighting ICT and the environment supporting ICT development in schools are emphasized.To increase the level of ICT leadership in primary and sencondary schools and enrich related research, this study selects Shanxi Province as sample frame to conduct a survey. Two research questions are explored: 1) what is the situation of ICT leadership in Shanxi Province? 2) what problems do exist in terms of ICT leadership in Shanxi Province? Revolving around the two research questions, a self-developed questionnaire was developed, in which The National Standard on Teachers Educational Technology Capabilities in Primary and Secondary Schools in China(2004), NETS A( 2009) and the above mentioned four dimension are structured. Random sampling was used. In addition, ten school principals were interviewed through semi-structured interview. To assure the reliability of this study, two pilot studies were conducted before the survey in Shanxi Province. After data collection, SPSS23.0 was used to assist the data management and analysis.This study finds:1) the information literacy of the principals was investigated on average in the middle, there is a certain gap between the cultivation of information technology and the cultivation of information technology. the awareness of the development of information technology has not been widely in the primary and secondary school principals, and there is a unbalanced development between the urban and rural primary and secondary schools; 2)in promoting the integration of information technology and "teaching and learning", the primary and secondary school principals in Shanxi province have formed a certain understanding. They do some work and the effect is relatively good. But the principals’ self planning and initiative still needs to be improved, and the current work is still relatively surface, is not deep and specific enough; 3)general information environment conditions in schools and other similar regional differences, but information organization and information culture there is a big difference between information "hardware" construction already has a Foundation, but the "software" construction problems, principal autonomy and importance in this respect is not enough;4)school information development vision and planning, most principals recognized the importance and urgency of school information, information has been incorporated into the school vision and planning, but there are significant difference in terms of the degree of integration of ICT in schools vision and strategy plan. Combining the data from interview, this study further analyzes the problems in terms of the ICT leadership development in Shanxi Province. They are the imbalance between informational perception and related skills, ineffective finance management, insufficient support from teachers, imbalance development of rural and urban education, and less capable of school principals in developing school vision with ICT. Finally this study puts forward some possible countermeasures to improve the present situation of ICT leadership in primary and secondary school in Shanxi Province, and based on the case study in Shanxi Province, some implications for developing ICT leadership in primary and secondary schools are provided as well.This study investigates the situation of ICT leadership and its existing problems. Its findings could assist with the improvement of ICT leadership in primary and secondary schools in Shanxi Province and similar regions in China.