MICTIVO: monitoring ICT integration in Flemish education: theoretical background and set-up

Parallel with ICT-investments, governments set-up monitoring programs to evaluate the return on investment and effects of ICT on educational practice. MICTIVO aims to monitor the ICT-integration in the Flemish education system. ICT-integration in MICTIVO is a combination of ICT-infrastructure, ICT-policy and ICT-use at the micro-level, in which three actors are involved: headmasters, teachers and students with their characteristics, ICT-competences and perceptions towards ICT. MICTIVO is devised as a recurrent instrument with room for additional indicators to assess the latest trends (e.g. social media use). During the first edition (2007-2008), scales were validated and empirically tested, and the second edition (2012-2013) is a follow-up study. Design principles were ensuring comparability (over time, between actors, between indicators) and avoiding redundancy. To get a representative view on the Flemish education system, 20% of the schools are selected through stratified random sampling. The selected schools are allocated to one of three sub studies. In the first, only headmasters are questioned (80% of the sample), in the second also all the teachers per school (10%) and in the third also several classes of students per school (10%). This will allow to run multilevel analyses. The strengths of MICTIVO are that we will get a representative view on the status of ICT-integration in Flanders, based on scales that were validated in the population and with strong psychometric properties.