MICTIVO: monitoring ICT integration in Flemish education: theoretical background and set-up

Parallel with ICT-investments, governments set-up monitoring programs to evaluate the return on investment and effects of ICT on educational practice. MICTIVO aims to monitor the ICT-integration in the Flemish education system. ICT-integration in MICTIVO is a combination of ICT-infrastructure, ICT-policy and ICT-use at the micro-level, in which three actors are involved: headmasters, teachers and students with their characteristics, ICT-competences and perceptions towards ICT. MICTIVO is devised as a recurrent instrument with room for additional indicators to assess the latest trends (e.g. social media use). During the first edition (2007-2008), scales were validated and empirically tested, and the second edition (2012-2013) is a follow-up study. Design principles were ensuring comparability (over time, between actors, between indicators) and avoiding redundancy. To get a representative view on the Flemish education system, 20% of the schools are selected through stratified random sampling. The selected schools are allocated to one of three sub studies. In the first, only headmasters are questioned (80% of the sample), in the second also all the teachers per school (10 and in the third also several classes of students per school (10. This will allow to run multilevel analyses. The strengths of MICTIVO are that we will get a representative view on the status of ICT-integration in Flanders, based on scales that were validated in the population and with strong psychometric properties.