ICT USE AND ATTITUDES AMONG SECONDARY EDUCATION TEACHERS IN ROMANIA

Secondary education in Romania has moved quickly over the last decade from a practical inexistence of ICT in schools to a decent level of endowment and access (although with enough room for improvement). Has the improved ICT access raised the actual level of ICT use in education? What makes some teachers use ICT more than others? This paper investigates the determinants of ICT use (and intention of use) among secondary education teachers (ISCED 2-3) in Romania. It makes use of data from one of the first representative surveys of its kind of secondary education teachers in Romania. Data (unused in prior academic research) about 1053 teachers from 150 schools was collected, under the supervision of this paper's authors, within a nation-wide, EU funded, e-learning training project. The paper reviews and applies the main theoretical frameworks used broadly by international research literature on technology adoption in education and other areas, primarily the Technology Acceptance Model (Fred D. Davis) and Innovation Diffusion Theory (Everett M Rogers). It explores the role of variables such as: perceived usefulness (of ICT), ease of use, personal innovativeness, technology compatibility, visibility, etc. To obtain these results multivariate techniques such as Ordinary Least Squares and Structural Equation Modelling are employed. We expect our study to make a double contribution. From an empirical point of view it produces evidence from a country that remains largely unstudied by the research literature on technology adoption in education, attempting to place the wider theoretical models in Romanian context. From a theoretical and methodological perspective, the main theories in the field are not just tested alternatively (by turn) but put to the test simultaneously to obtain a pooled and hopefully improved model.