Third-, fourth- and fifth-grade teachers in 359 elementary schools in 12 school districts were given the opportunity to apply to participate in the InTech Project. Once applications were received and qualifications verified, schools were contacted to confirm their participation. The sample consisted of 71 third-, fourth- and fifth-grade school teachers from 28 schools representing 7 school districts in the state of Georgia. A pretest-posttest, nonequivalent multiple-group quasi-experimental design was used in this study. Quasi- experimental research involves the "use of intact groups of subjects in an experiment, rather than assigning subjects at random to experimental treatments" (Wiersma, 1995, p. 139). The teachers who participated in the InTech Project were "intact" in the sense that they were self-selected and chose to apply to participate in the project. The teachers who applied were given a choice between two sets of dates to attend the summer training. The subjects were divided into three groups based on the dates they elected to attend the summer training. In order to enhance the validity of the design, the three treatments were randomly assigned to the three groups of participants. According to Wiersma (1995), this type of assignment tends to equalize the differences among teachers over the experimental treatments. The experimental treatment involved the use of three different training approaches applied to the three different groups of teachers. The three training groups were (a) Skill/Integration Group (S/I), (b) Integration/Skill Group (I/S), and (c) Skill and Integration Group (S&I). All three groups received two weeks of training during the summer augmented by four additional training days during the following school year. For all three groups, the first week of training was conducted in July and the second week in August. The first week of training for the S/I group focused on the development of skills with various pieces of hardware and software. The second week for the S/I group focused on curriculum integration. The content for the I/S group was reversed. The first week of training for the I/S group focused on curriculum integration. The second week focused on the development of skills with various pieces of hardware and software. For the S&I group, skill development and curriculum integration were combined during both weeks of training. |
