Educational Transformation – A Failed Prediction? A Decennial Cross-Sectional Study Within Norwegian Teacher Education

Abstract

In most industrialized countries, the use of information and communication technology in education has been an important area of focus and discussion for many years. Moreover, teaching with digital technology changed dramatically as COVID-19 became a global concern. The change was so dramatic that it was often referred to as an educational transformation. This study explores how this fluctuating transformation affected practitioners’ attitudes. Digital technology has changed education, especially during the pandemic, but did this transformation drastically affect practitioners’ attitudes related to digital technology from a long-term perspective? This repeated cross-sectional study was conducted at UiT the Arctic University of Norway, and data were collected by the use of an online survey at different points in time during the period 2015–2024. The study included 674 survey responses from three target groups: teacher educators, pre-service early childhood teachers and pre-service teachers. Our findings show that when the target group is accounted for, digital skills are the best predictor for attitudes towards the use of digital technology in education, followed by the year data were collected. The notion of an educational transformation was tested through regression analysis to determine whether the relationship between attitudes and year of collection was polynomial. The results show that the participants responded in line with pre-covid samples – as a linear relationship. The digital transformation seems to have been overrated, and teachers’ practices and educational attitudes have not changed dramatically due to the global pandemic.