Date of Award:

5-2023

Document Type:

Dissertation

Degree Name:

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department:

School of Teacher Education and Leadership

Committee Chair(s)

Patricia Moyer-Packenham

Committee

Patricia Moyer-Packenham

Committee

Jessica Shumway

Committee

Kady Schneiter

Committee

Sarah Schwartz

Committee

Katherine Vela

Abstract

In 2019, RAND Corporation asked teachers which digital materials they used. This study expanded on this research by exploring the features contained in these programs. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between teachers’ access to features and school (e.g., grand band, socioeconomic status), teacher (e.g., experience), and feature characteristics (e.g., feature choice). I report a significant regression model to predict the likelihood for a teacher to have access to each of the six features within differing contexts based on the characteristics.

To answer the research questions, I first reported descriptive statistics as percentages of teachers who had access to each of the six features, as well as predicted probabilities for access to each feature calculated from the null model of the multilevel logistical regression. These results showed that practice problems and instructional videos were significantly more likely than interactive scenarios for all grade band/socio- economic status combinations except teachers at high income high schools. This showed that traditional teaching methods (in the form of practice problems and instructional videos) still dominate other methods (e.g., interactive scenarios), even when teachers use digital curricula. Next, I used the final model to explore these probabilities within subgroups of the sample. Key results from this analysis showed that high school teachers were significantly less likely than elementary teachers to have access to all features except create/revise content. This sheds light on differences between elementary and high school curricula choices. Based on these findings, it appears that there is an important need for more high-quality digital programs for high school mathematics content, but these should not be developed at the expense of the ability to create and/or revise content. Last, the study contributed to the field by finding that significant differences in socioeconomic levels do in fact exist regarding digital material use, but only for middle school teachers.

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