School teachers’ digital selfefficacy in Japan and Sweden. A study of the importance of digital self-efficacy and relevant constraining factors.

Abstract

Aim: The thesis examines associations between teachers’ self-efficacy in teaching using ICT (information and communications technology) and actual ICT usage in classroom teaching, also controlling for the availability of various resources in the form of teacher and school characteristics, in Japan and Sweden, two countries with contrasting situations regarding ICT usage in school education. Theory: Past studies have shown that the availability of ICT infrastructure does not always coincide with ICT classroom use. Drawing on this, special attention is paid to how teachers’ self-confidence or self-efficacy in digital teaching may influence their teaching behaviour. Method: I analyse data from the most recent TALIS in 2018, collected from teachers and principals in the two countries. This is done by performing ordered logistic regressions for the Swedish and Japanese datasets to see how the different variables are associated with “Classroom ICT use”. Results: The results show that digital self-efficacy has a very high, statistically significant correlation in both countries, which confirms previous findings in the literature. But the data also reveal differences. For example, school infrastructure and gender seem correlated to ICT use in Sweden but not in Japan. At the same time, lack of ICT elements in professional development appears to be negatively correlated with ICT use in both countries. Conversely, age does not seem to be correlated with ICT use in either country.