Educators’ enacted beliefs about the use of print and digital media in early and middle childhood classrooms

Author ORCID Identifier

http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6955-4955

http://orcid.org/0009-0002-8923-012X

http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8645-0146

http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5052-5476

http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6164-7823

http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5578-4787

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-14-2024

Division

School of Education Research Center

Keywords

teachers, beliefs, media

Disciplines

Early Childhood Education | Educational Technology | Elementary Education

Abstract

Teachers hold conflicting beliefs about the usefulness and role of print and digital media in the classroom. The purpose of this study was to explore teachers’ enacted beliefs (beliefs that explain classroom practice) about using print and digital media. Early childhood and elementary teachers (N = 519) from a rural U.S. state were surveyed. They similarly reported using both print and digital media in their classrooms for a variety of purposes (i.e., because of the affordances of the media and their context, benefits for student learning, the independence with children can use them, to reward students, and for leisure and collaborative activities). Teachers at both levels held stronger enacted beliefs about print than digital media in all domains except rewarding students (for which digital was higher), but differences were sometimes small in size. The most consistent predictor of enacted beliefs for using digital media was professional development, although it did not predict usage for learning purposes. This suggests that greater professional development could be important for supporting teachers in deciding what, when, why, and how to integrate digital media into their classroom to suit a variety of other purposes such as promoting independence or fostering collaboration.

Publication Title

Discover Education

Volume

3

Issue

233

DOI

10.1007/s44217-024-00329-x

Rights

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativeco mmons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

Comments

Supplemental resources are available at https://osf.io/zs57r/

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