Second Information Technology in Education Study: SITES 2006 Technical Report

The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) has been conducting comparative studies for 50 years. SITES 2006 is the fifth wave of surveys related to information and communication technology (ICT), a wave that IEA started with its Computers in Education Study (two studies with data collection in 1989 and 1992), followed by the Second Information Technology in Education Studies (SITES), comprising SITES Module 1 (SITES-M1) and SITES Module 2 (SITES-M2). SITES 2006 is an ambitious and demanding study, involving complex procedures for drawing samples, collecting data, and analyzing and reporting findings. The technical implementation of SITES 2006 resembles, to a large extent, the procedures used in IEA's past and present student achievement studies, such as TIMSS and PIRLS. However, the adult target populations, for instance, imply certain operational consequences and necessities. The SITES 2006 technical report therefore provides full documentation of the methodological and analytical implementation of the study, which produced the international database underlying the international report. To ensure that researchers can work effectively with the study's findings and data as well as confidently replicate the procedures used to produce the international report, the technical report is complemented by the SITES 2006 user guide, which describes the structure, content, and proposed usage of the international database. The combination of all three publications consequently allows analysts to confidently replicate procedures and to accurately undertake new analyses in areas of special interest. This paper contains an overview of the main characteristics of SITES 2006. These are further elaborated in the subsequent chapters with respect to the technical, methodological, and analytical implementation of the study. Five appendices are included: (1) Acknowledgments; (2) Characteristics of the National Samples; (3) Sampling Stratification Variables; (4) Cultural and National Adaptations to the Questionnaires; and (5) Examples of Teacher Listing and Tracking Forms. Individual sections contain references. (Contains 78 tables and 6 figures.) [For the "SITES 2006 User Guide for the International Database", see ED510138.]