Pre-service teachers’ attitudes towards information communication technology

Abstract

Integration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) into education has been an important concern in many countries. The purpose of the study was to find out the attitudes of pre-service teachers towards Information and Communication Technology. Descriptive survey design was used for this study, and a semantic differential questionnaire with seven options was used to measure the attitudes of preservice teachers towards ICT. Three hundred students drawn from Level 400 of a department in the University of Cape Coast in Ghana were selected to form the sample for the study using the stratified random sampling technique. From the study, the preservice teachers showed positive attitude to ICT with a mean score of five for all the subscales of the questionnaire which translates as ‘slightly important’. The research reviewed that overall, preservice teachers can be categorised at the “understanding and application of process” stage of the technology adoption stages. A further analysis was conducted to find out the predominant stage of technology adoption among the preservice teachers. It was realised that majority of the respondents rated themselves at the “understanding and application of process” stage which was followed by “learning the process” stage. A one-way multivariate analysis of variance was conducted to investigate if the mean differences among stages of adoption of technology and attitudes towards technology being observed are statistically significant. The study revealed that preservice teachers technology adoption stage differed based on their attitudes towards technology. The preservice teachers showed positive attitude to ICT.