Research On Rural Primary And Secondary School Teachers' Adoption Of Information Technology

The building of informationalized school is a complex,creative and dynamic process of progressive stages,in which teachers plays the role of innovation agent.Teachers is an important drive of the spread of information technology in schools.Their ability of using information technology in dealing with works is a basic criterion to judge whether the building of informationalized school is successful or not.Therefore,it is important to research teachers' use of information technology(IT)in the process of building modern schools.Recently,policy-makers,education-practitioners and education-researchers all give attention to the issue of interaction between teachers and information technology.Teachers' use of IT imply their initiative in the interaction between themselves and IT,which can help to better describe the spread of IT in schools,and therefore to put forward viable theories and plans.Influenced by rural and urban gaps and regional factors,the development level of IT of schools in rural areas falls behind their counterparts in urban areas.In order to prevent development gap of IT between rural and urban areas,it is necessary to have a clear understanding of teachers' use of IT,to describe the difficulties of teachers' use of IT in their teaching,and to research the characteristic of adoption system and strategies of application of IT in teaching in rural areas.Firstly,documentary research is used to understand the background information and the problems we are faced with.Secondly,the research explains and summarizes relevant concepts,using UTAUT model as the referential framework of the research.Questionnaire designed based on this model is used in the large-scale investigation of rural teachers in 12 provinces across the country.Moreover,the author would use SPSS 21.0 to analyze data including descriptive analysis,reliability and validity analysis and other analyses.Then,the author would verify the hypothesis and describe the current situation of rural teachers' use of IT from the perspective of rural-urban comparison.Finally,the author would give some suggestions and opinions to the problems according to the research conclusion.The research finding shows that the model of teachers' IT ability constructed by the Research Institute of Rural Education is efficient to analyze the condition of rural teachers' use of IT.The model can be used to explain the data of this research fully and reasonably.It also should be noticed that the model of rural teachers' use of IT is different from that of urban teachers;the model of rural teachers' use of IT in different regions,school sizes,teacher demographics are different.And the modle of rural teachers,especially rural male teachers,are mainly influenced by the self-efficacy of IT.The modle of urban teachers,especially urban men,younger and postgraduate teachers,are mainly influenced by the external influences of IT.The effect of self-efficacy and external influences is relatively low on the IT teaching intention in poorer areas of the economy.Teachers in poorer areas of the economy have lower frequency of IT teaching,teachers in career maturity have higher frequency of IT teaching.