Usage

According to the School IT Survey (item 4c), school administration and teaching and learning were ranked as the most common uses of IT in primary schools, with means of 4.8 and 4.1 respectively on a 6-point scale (where 1 represents ‘practically no use’ and 6 represents ‘using the software most of the time’) measuring extent of use. School library use had a mean of 3.8 but communication with staff, students and parents all had means of less than 3.

School heads

Nearly all of the primary school heads interviewed had computers in their offices for their exclusive use. During the month prior to completing the questionnaire, the majority of school heads (97.9%) had made at least some daily use of computers (School Heads’ Questionnaire item 1e). 53.4% spent up to two hours per day and a further 24.4% spent two to less than four hours. Only 7.4% said they had spent more than 10 hours. The most common use by primary school heads (School Heads’

Questionnaire item 2) was for school administration (94.9% using computers occasionally or always for this purpose), followed by researching or analysing school data (71.8%). 60.4% said they occasionally or always used it for inter-school communications and joint school activities, but less than half indicated that they had occasionally or always used it for communicating with students, teachers or parents or for teaching.

The usage patterns at home are similar, but the numbers using computers at home are slightly lower.

71.6% had used computers at home for up to two hours per day, 13.4% for two to less than four hours, and 7% for more than 10 hours. Only 3.3% said they had not used computers at home at all during this period (School Heads’ Questionnaire item 1c). More than 74% used their home computers for job-related tasks (77%) or for communication (74.6%) or browsing/searching for information (75.5%) (School Heads’ Questionnaire item 1d). Very few used it for other purposes like reading news, entertainment or personal matters like banking.

Teachers

The School Visits and Focus Group Interviews with teachers indicated wide variation in their access to computers for their own use in school. In some primary schools, due to insufficient space in staff rooms, there are only three or four computers located in a small room for all the teachers to share, whereas in others there is easy and abundant access. The School Survey (item 2b) revealed that 19.3%

of the primary schools surveyed had two or less computers in staffrooms, 41.1% had 4 or less and 64.8% had 6 or less. 10% of schools reported having 11 or more computers in staffrooms. Some schools have implemented different policies to encourage teachers' usage, like two teachers sharing one notebook (half a year for each) or the school subsidises a fixed amount of money for teachers to buy their own.

In the Teachers’ Questionnaire item 1e, 96.3% of teachers reported having made some use of computers at school. 66.2% reported that, in school, they had used computers for up to two hours per day and 14.4% had used them for two to less than four hours. 7.8% had used them for more than 10 hours. 81% said they used computers in school for teaching and around 60% for school administration or management and browsing or searching for information (Teachers’ Questionnaire item 1f). Only a small proportion of teachers in primary schools reported using school computers for communication or research on teaching.

At home, only 2.8% of the teachers reported that they had not used computers at all. 53.9% of the teachers had used computers for up to two hours and 20.9% for two to less than four hours (Teachers’

Questionnaire item 1c). Their main purpose for using computers at home (Teachers’ Questionnaire item 1d) was for job-related tasks (86.2%), followed by communication (71.5%) and browsing or

searching for information (73.1%). Similar to the findings for the school heads, reading news, entertainment and personal matters were not very commonly reported uses by primary school teachers.

Students

78.7% of P3 students and 85.1% of P6 students reported having made at least some use of computers at school (Students’ Questionnaire item 2). 93% and 95.9% respectively had made at least some use of computers at home over the same period, showing clearly that more primary school children use computers at home than at school. 77.8% of P3 and 77.2% of P6 students reported having no use or less than one hour’s use of computers at school per day. On the other hand at home (Students’

Questionnaire item 1b), 54.1% of P3 and 28.1% of P6 students reported no use or less than one hour’s use per day. 45.9% of P3 students and 71.9% of P6 students had spent one hour or more and the percentage of P6 students spending 3 hours or more per day (32.2%) is more than double the percentage of P3 students (14.6%). 76.3% of P3 students and 85.7% of P6 students said they had used computers at home for school or learning-related activities, 64.2% and 72.5% respectively doing this kind of activity for less than two hours per day (Students’ Questionnaire item 1c).

From Student Questionnaire item 4 (Table 6.7), it can be seen that the most common use of computers at school for both P3 and P6 is searching for information in the Internet – even more than learning computer skills themselves. More P3 students reported using computers at school for drilling exercises and creative work, although the percentages reporting these are quite low. Higher percentages of P6 than P3 students reported all of the other listed uses.

Table 6.7: Nature of students’ use of computers in school (Students’ Questionnaire, Q. 4)

P3 (N = 2436)

P6 (N = 2476) Nature of Use

% %

Searching for information on the Internet 33.5 58.5

Project work 9.1 32.0

Drilling exercises 18.9 10.0

Creative work 12.8 11.1

Presentations/PowerPoint 1.9 13.3

Learning computer skills 30.7 38.1

Self-learning software 6.7 11.1

Note: Multiple response items

Students from both P3 and P6 indicated that the most common location for using computers outside of school hours is their own home (70.6% and 82.8% respectively), with 26.3% of P3 and 26.9% of P6 saying they use public libraries and 19.4% of P3 and 23.2% of P6 students their own school facilities (Students’ Questionnaire item 16). In the student focus group interviews, some students said they make use of school access time to do their homework, but this was mostly P3 students. Many of the P6 students said that they mostly prefer to use these breaks from classes to talk with their friends and relax. Another popular location of out-of-school computer use by primary school students is other people’s homes (22.7% and 37.3% for P3 and P6 respectively). Very few primary school students indicated that they make use of community/youth centres (7% of P3 and 8.4% of P6 students), or cyber-cafes (3.4% of P3 and 9.9% of P6 students). This low use is further corroborated by the focus group interviews, in which very few students mentioned that they have used community/youth centres for IT access. It is interesting to note that there is quite a sharp increase from P3 to P6 in the percentages of students using computers in their own or other peoples’ homes – again supporting the suggestion discussed elsewhere that for older children computer use becomes a part of their social leisure activity patterns (Tell, 1999/2000).

Students were also asked to elaborate further on the average time per day spent, outside school hours, on a range of activities (Student Questionnaire item 17). The results are shown in Table 6.8.

Chapter 6: General Findings from Primary School Sector

Table 6.8: Average amount of time spent by students per day outside school hours on various activities (Students’ Questionnaire, Q. 17)

P3 P6

% of students choosing % of students choosing

Activities N

None at all

< 30 min

30 min to < 1hr

1 to <

2 hrs 2 to <

3 hrs 3 to <

4 hrs

≥ 4 hrs

N None at all

< 30 min

30 min to < 1hr

1 to <

2 hrs 2 to <

3 hrs 3 to <

4 hrs

≥ 4 hrs a 2427 40.5 29.6 19.8 7.2 1.3 0.4 1.2 2470 25.0 31.8 28.2 10.6 2.4 0.8 1.3 b 2398 48.9 27.7 15.1 5.4 1.2 0.7 1.1 2461 34.9 37.3 19.8 5.8 1.1 0.3 0.8 c 2386 37.6 31.9 18.7 8.4 1.6 0.6 1.2 2450 32.0 38.0 21.6 6.1 1.6 0.4 0.4 d 2395 29.8 29.7 22.3 11.0 3.7 0.8 2.8 2453 10.4 21.7 34.1 22.8 6.1 2.5 2.4 e 2386 18.8 25.9 24.7 15.1 6.0 2.7 6.9 2452 8.6 14.7 19.8 22.8 14.0 6.6 13.7 f 2405 49.2 28.4 13.3 5.4 1.5 0.8 1.5 2456 38.4 33.1 17.1 7.6 2.2 0.9 0.8 g 2397 52.0 24.2 12.0 6.7 2.0 0.9 2.3 2462 29.3 24.0 19.5 13.4 5.6 2.7 5.5 h 2402 77.7 10.6 5.2 3.6 0.8 0.9 1.2 2460 65.8 16.7 8.2 4.4 1.9 1.2 1.8 i 2407 69.8 14.2 7.6 3.5 1.6 1.3 2.1 2464 35.9 18.5 16.6 11.4 6.5 3.8 7.4 a. Assignments

b. Using instructional software

c. Participating in other school/learning related activities d. Searching for information on the Internet

e. Entertainment

f. Downloading documents/files for learning g. Downloading music/movies/freeware

h. Communicating with teachers through E-mail/ICQ

i. Communicating with classmates/friends through E-mail/ICQ

Between 50.8% and 62.4% of P3 students and between 61.6% and 75% of P6 students indicated they had done at least some learning-related activities such as completing assignments, using instructional software, downloading documents or files for learning, or participating in other school-related learning activities. There is a consistent pattern of higher percentages of P6 students having engaged in these activities. On the other hand, it is clear that entertainment-related activities are more popular with both P3 and P6 students, with 81.2% and 91.4% respectively having spent at least some time on these.

Again related to entertainment there are quite large differences between the proportions of P3 and P6 students having participated in downloading music or movies (48% and 70.7%) and particularly in the use of ICQ or email to communicate with classmates or friends (30.2% and 64.1%).

It was also found in the Student Focus Group Interviews that entertainment is a dominant use of computers by primary school children. Usually the first answer the students gave when asked how they use computers outside school was that they use them for games. It was only when asked how they use their home computers for study purposes that they elaborated with details about Internet browsing, usually for projects. Some said they search the Internet for interesting games or to read the news, but their use is not solely for entertainment. In cases where teachers gave them some kind of specific learning targets such as I-CUBE (www.icubeworld.com) or A passage a day (www.prof-ho.com/reading), then the students seem to have reported higher use of IT for learning purposes.

In nearly all of the examples of learning-related activities listed in Students’ Questionnaire item 17, around half of the P3 students and slightly more than half of the P6 students indicated that they spent less than one hour per day. Considerably more P6 students indicated that they had made some use of searching for information on the Internet (89.6% compared to 70.2% of P3), again with slightly more than half indicating that they had spent less than one hour per day on this activity. It is not clear from this question whether their Internet use was for school-related or entertainment purposes, although the student focus group interviews suggested the former and that children actually like using it for this purpose because it makes searching for information easier. When it came to the entertainment-related activities, however, 30.7% of P3 students and 57.1% of P6 students said that they spent more than one hour on average per day. In fact it is somewhat bewildering to see that 9.6% of P3 students and 20.3%

of P6 reported having spent more than three hours on average per day on entertainment activities using IT.

Further evidence of the increased importance placed by P6 students on communication when compared to P3 students can be seen by the data about numbers of email accounts and personal websites (Students’ Questionnaire items 18 and 19). 44.8% of P3 students have at least one email account compared to 82.4% of P6. 16.7% of P3 students and 48.8% of P6 students have multiple accounts. On the other hand, personal websites do not seem to be a high priority for primary school students. The majority of either grade level does not have any personal websites (66.6% and 70.9%

respectively) and of those who do, 16.8% of P3 and 20.9% of P6 students have only one.

It can be noted that the usage patterns indicated by these data are similar to those shown by the students who completed the IT Activity Daily Log, reported in Section 6.5.3. Parent data can also be used to triangulate the students’ home use of computers. Their responses to Parents’ Questionnaire item 4b corroborate the students’ claims that the most common activity is entertainment, followed by searching for information on the Internet and doing activities related to school learning, again with more P6 than P3 students doing all of these things. It is encouraging to see that the parents seem to be aware of what their children are doing with their home computers.