Innovative ICT‐supported pedagogical practices: results from the international study of information technology in education

This special issue presents a number of secondary analyses of data collected in 2006 in the Second Information Technology in Education Study (SITES 2006) that was conducted under the auspices of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). IEA conducted from 1998 to 2006 SITES composed of three studies on the integration of information communication technology (ICT) in education. Table 1 presents an overview of the three SITES studies as summarized by Anderson and Plomp (2009). The SITES studies are a follow-up of IEA’s Computers in Education (CompEd) study. CompEd had a focus on surveying the extent to which ICT was available in schools and what problems were experienced by schools and teachers. Data collection took place in 1989 (Pelgrum & Plomp 1993) and in 1992 (Pelgrum et al. 1993). In addition to the focus of CompEd, the purpose of SITES also was to study to what extent and how education is responding to demands of the information society versus those of the industrial society (see also Anderson 2008; Voogt 2010). Several terms have been used in the three SITES studies to distinguish between educational practices that are associated with the information society and the industrial society, respectively. An overview of the terminology used in the different SITES studies is presented in Table 2. SITES-Module 1 (or SITES-M1) collected data in 1998 in 26 participating countries in one or more of three school levels: primary, lower secondary and upper secondary. As reported in Pelgrum and Anderson (1999), this module produced findings about the extent to which ICT is used in education and whether education systems have implemented objectives and pedagogical approaches that are considered important for education in an information society. The findings of SITES-M1 showed that educational systems differed a lot in this respect but that in a few educational systems, more than half of the schools had begun to use ICT to change towards a more student-centred pedagogical approach with the aim of making students more active in and responsible for their own learning. In SITES-M1, principals were asked to give an example of ‘the most satisfying experience of a learning activity in their school in which students use computer-related technology which gives them the most useful, effective and advanced learning experiences with technology’. Voogt (1999) analysed these experiences and concluded that students’ activities with ICT focused on information processing, production or communication in combination with word processing, technology for searching for information and technology for facilitating communication (p. 220). She concluded that many of these ‘most satisfying experiences’ with technology were aimed at offering active/productive learning activities to students, in which ICT played a substantial role. In the SITES-M2 study, conducted from 2000 to 2003, the so-called ‘innovative pedagogical practices supported by ICT’ were examined by conducting comparative case studies in 28 countries (Kozma 2003). In total, 174 cases provided researchers and practitioners with good examples of how technology can change classroom teaching and provided policy-makers with guidelines on how to increase the positive impact of technology in their education systems. An important finding was that the students involved in these innovative pedagogical practices often were engaged in constructing knowledge products, including tasks of searching, organizing and evaluating knowledge. These tasks refer to skills that are often referred to as ‘lifelong learning skills’ or ‘21st century skills’. The learning activities reflected pedagogical approaches that are considered important in the information or knowledge society (Voogt & Pelgrum 2005). The findings of SITES-M2 also provided a better insight regarding the doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2729.2010.00375.x Editorial