Search

The main purpose of this study was to examine the validity of the Teacher Intentions to Integrate Technology in Education Scale using pre-service teacher samples from three countries on three continents--Turkey, Spain and the United States. Study participants were 550 pre-service teachers from three universities in Turkey, Spain and the USA (219, 209, and 122 respectively). The majority of the participants were female. All of the participants were junior and senior students enrolled in elementary teacher education programs. Specifically, this study compared pre-service teachers' self-efficacy, outcome expectations, intentions (internal factors) and perceived school climate (external factor) for technology integration in education in these countries. The results of confirmatory factor analysis in this study supported the construct validity of the scale in all three samples. Hierarchical regression analysis was conducted to examine the relative contribution of self-efficacy, outcome expectations and perceived school climate on pre-service teachers' intentions to integrate technology into their future classroom activities. The external factor of school climate predicted pre-service teachers' intention to integrate technology in education in all three samples. However, there were certain differences among the teachers from different countries in our sample in terms of technology integration. Unlike Turkey and the US, self-efficacy predicted technology integration intention to a smaller degree than school climate in the Spanish sample. Interestingly, outcome expectations scores did not make a statistically significant contribution to predicting pre-service teachers' intention to use technology in the US sample. Given this study's findings, it is important to consider differences in technology integration intentions that exist in different countries, when conducting empirical research on teacher perceptions of using technology for teaching and learning.