Students' skills and practices of using ICT: results of a national assessment in Finland

Abstract The purpose of the study was to investigate Finnish elementary and high school students’ skills and practices of using the new information and communication technologies (ICT). Beliefs about the importance of ICT were also assessed. Five hundred and fifteen students responded to a self-report questionnaire. The students attended 25 schools that used ICT intensively and represented all provinces of Finland. From the analysis, there emerged three factors that represented these students’ relationships to ICT. Characteristic of the first factor was a belief that computer supported learning makes learning more meaningful and encourages one to make more efforts to study. Self-reported competence in using ICT was strongly loaded on the second factor, together with intensive reported use of ICT at home as well as networking with expert cultures and coaching of other people to improve their ICT skills. The third factor represented intensity of using ICT at school and appears to be determined more by the availability of equipment and the extent to which ICT is used in the school than by a student’s expertise in ICT.

[1]  Michelene T. H. Chi,et al.  Expertise in Problem Solving. , 1981 .

[2]  M. Scardamalia,et al.  The CSILE project: Trying to bring the classroom into World 3. , 1994 .

[3]  R. Sternberg.  Advances in the psychology of human intelligence , 1982 .

[4]  Xiaodong Lin,et al.  Instructional Design and Development of Learning Communities: An Invitation to a Dialogue. , 1995 .

[5]  M. Scardamalia,et al.  Surpassing Ourselves: An Inquiry into the Nature and Implications of Expertise , 1993 .

[6]  Marlene Scardamalia,et al.  Computer Support for Knowledge-Building Communities , 1994 .

[7]  J. Bruer.  Schools for Thought: A Science of Learning in the Classroom , 1993 .

[8]  A. Collins,et al.  Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning , 1989 .

[9]  David R. Olson,et al.  The Handbook of Education and Human Development , 1998 .

[10]  D. Olson,et al.  The Handbook of education and human development : new models of learning, teaching, and schooling , 1996 .

[11]  Gavriel Salomon,et al.  Novel constructivist learning environments and novel technologies: some issues to be concerned with , 1998 .

[12]  Corporate The Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt.  A multimedia literacy series: the cognition and technology group at Vanderbilt , 1996, CACM.

[13]  K. A. Ericsson,et al.  Expert and exceptional performance: evidence of maximal adaptation to task constraints. , 1996, Annual review of psychology.

[14]  Erno Lehtinen,et al.  The Challenges of ICT in Finnish Education , 1999 .

[15]  Lasse Lipponen,et al.  The challenges for computer supported collaborative learning in elementary and secondary level: Finnish perspectives , 1999, CSCL.