Institute for the Integration of Technology
into Teaching and Learning
Instruments - Technology Assessment
This booklet is for educators who wish to measure attitudes toward
information technology for one of more of the following groups:
K-12 students,
K-12 preservice/inservice teachers, and
University faculty.
Nine instruments are provided for this purpose:
The Computer Attitude Questionnaire (CAQ),
Concerns-based Adoption Model-Levels of Use (CBAM-LoU),
The Faculty Attitudes Toward Information Technology (FAIT),
The Teachers' Attitudes Toward Computers (TAC),
The Teachers' Attitudes Toward Information Technology (TAT),
Technology in Education Competency Survey (TECS),
Technology Proficiency Self Assessment (TPSA),
Stages of Adoption of Technology (SA), and
The Young Children's Computer Inventory (YCCI),
The instruments are intended to complement each other so that a profile
of educators' attitudes and learner dispositions for an entire school system
can be obtained, if desired. For example, the YCCI, CAQ, and TAC each contain
two computer attitude subscales that measure the same constructs in primary
school children, middle school students, and teachers.
Various sections of the instruments employ Likert ('strongly disagree'
to 'strongly agree') items, Semantic Differential items (ratings along
a continuum between opposite pairs), and paired comparisons items (forced
choice between two alternatives). Most operate on the principle that
several items, when summed together, produce a more reliable index than
a single item alone, and all are constructed so that each subscale can
be used independently of the others.
These instruments have been developed and validated over the past ten
years by researchers associated with the Institute for the Integration
of Technology into Teaching and Learning (IITTL). All have built upon
the work of previous scholars in many states and nations with support
from numerous agencies, including the Meadows Foundation, the Japan
Society for the Promotion of Science, the Fulbright Foundation, and
the Texas Center for Educational Technology. Four of the nine instruments
were developed in conjunction with doctoral dissertations, while a fifth
was a product of a two-year research initiative funded by the Matthews
Chair for Research in Education at the University of North Texas. All
have been validated in numerous state, national, and international studies,
and two of the development efforts were recognized by awards from the
American Educational Research Association (Knezek & Miyashita, 1991)
and the Society for Information Technology in Teacher Education
(Christensen & Knezek, 1997).