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It’s More Than Just Technology Adoption: Understanding Variations in Teachers’ Use of an Online Planning Tool

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Abstract

This paper examines variability in teachers’ usage patterns as they interacted with an online teacher support tool, the Curriculum Customization Service (CCS), in their professional work. Understanding variation of use with technology provides information about why users, and in this case teachers, use certain elements in their planning and teaching. By mining the usage log files of over 40 teachers who used the CCS over a year-long period, we analyzed for variability using a framework developed in marketing research to characterize appropriation of technology. This analysis helped reveal different kinds of teachers’ patterns along two dimensions: frequency and variability of use. We then turned to qualitative records of teachers’ experiences during the year to better understand why those variations appeared. Focusing on the experiences of several teachers, using their log files with interview and observation data, we distilled “contextual contingencies” that influenced how they chose to use the CCS.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the teachers (and their students) who participated in our study. This work could not have been conducted without their participation.

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (DUE-1043858 and DUE-1043638). The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the NSF. The authors declare they have no funding or conflict of interest in this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instructional Psychology and Technology, Brigham Young University, 150G MCKB-BYU, Provo, UT, 84602, USA

    Heather Leary

  2. Graduate School of Education, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Victor R. Lee

  3. Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences, Utah State University, Logan, UT, USA

    Mimi Recker

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  1. Heather Leary
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  2. Victor R. Lee
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  3. Mimi Recker
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Correspondence to Heather Leary.

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Research Involving Human Participants, their Data or Biological Material

Data collected for this work can be accessed by contacting the authors and will be shared as anonymized data. This work was conducted under the approval of the institutional review boards at the authors institutions at the time of data collection. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Leary, H., Lee, V.R. & Recker, M. It’s More Than Just Technology Adoption: Understanding Variations in Teachers’ Use of an Online Planning Tool. TechTrends 65, 269–277 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-020-00576-3

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