Policy impacts on pedagogical practice and ICT use: an exploration of the results from SITES 2006

The Second Information Technology in Education Study (SITES) 2006 results reveal that principals' perceived presence of lifelong learning-related pedagogical activities in their schools had changed markedly since the same data was collected in 1998 in SITES-M1. More intriguing was the fact that the directions of the changes were quite different depending on the education systems concerned - many of the Asian countries reported very high increases while some of the European countries reported large drops over the same 8-year period. This paper reports statistical evidence that the observed 'pendulum swing' reflects actual changes in teaching practices in these countries. Exploratory multilevel analyses results consistently show that national means of principals' vision can be used as a system-level indicator predicting national means of pedagogical orientations in schools several years later. These findings also indicate the possibility of the 'pendulum effect' being a consequence of system-level policy differences in the countries participating in the two SITES studies.