BIODIVERSITY AND COMPUTER APPLICATIONS: A QUALITATIVE CASE STUDY

We present data from the initial questionnaire of a EU funded project. An online 42-question questionnaire was developed which probed a convenience sample of teachers for their background, use of apps, usefulness of apps and in which subject in the STEM constellation, apps were used through frequency indicators and perceptions of usefulness indicators. As expected 81% of teachers were both female and primary teachers. However, there was a wide variety of scientific education between the cohort in spite of this homogeneity and 25% of the cohort peaking at higher-level high school biology. Examining the use of technology showed how dominant interactive white boards, IWBs, have become, and other major technologies are using desktops/laptops whereas video providing apps and online apps for learning were explored. The 42-question x 52-case dataset was exposed to a simple Pearson correlation calculation, and the significant correlations noted. In such a large questionnaire, there appeared in the correlation table "clusters" of correlations but we have to be cautious as how we express such positive correlations. The teacher cohort was split between those who found the use of APPS in teaching specific content areas either not-applicable - rating of '6'; or used the frequency label - 'almost never' and those who did find apps for various topics useful to varying degrees. Non-metric multidimensional scaling, MDS, was also applied to the transposed data matrix using the ASCAL protocol in SPSS Statistics v21.0, which uses the Takane-Young-de Leeuw S-stress - formula 1, and a plot was made of the emerging dimensions. Nearly all the teachers belong to one large cluster, effectively a spectrum with teachers who increasingly used apps or thought them useful at one end and the teachers who increasingly thought the use of apps in teaching problematic or irrelevant.