Date of Award

Spring 2019

Rights

© 2019 Christopher J. Bernard

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Education (EdD)

Department

Education

First Advisor

Brianna Parsons

Second Advisor

Yvette Ghormley

Abstract

As the world changes from an industrial driven society to one more focused on services and knowledge, the drive for change within higher education is mounting from both students and employers. With the availability of the vast majority of the world’s knowledge available to an ever-increasing populace via the Internet, students and employers alike are no longer satisfied with the three r’s – reading, writing, and arithmetic. Instead, employers are expecting graduates to be knowledgeable of the three C’s – collaboration, communication, and creative problem solving to negotiate a progressively complex global market.

Through advances in cognitive science, we now have a better understanding of how individual learners construct and retain new knowledge. At odds with this understanding of how individuals learn is the continued use of the lecture class format where an instructor is the center of the classroom. The lecture class format or Socratic Method has not only demonstrated a lack of effectiveness compared to other methods such as active-learning which places the student at the center of the classroom but may even disenfranchise students leading to lower test scores and retention issues. Yet, when higher education institutions attempt more productive methods of learning based on the ideas of constructivism such as active-learning or student-centered learning the efforts fail as instructors naturally revert back to the lecture method for a variety of reasons.

Where technology has enabled change in other areas of our lives such as social media, entertainment, and retail it has yet to make as profound of an effect in higher education. Understanding to what extent certain curricular ideologies may predict the adoption of technology in the classroom may be beneficial in emboldening change from the Socratic Method to a more student-centered learning experience. Other benefits may include improvements in the return on investments made by higher education institutions as well as shortened technology deployment timelines improving opportunities to keep up with rapidly changing technology trends.

Using a combination of two survey instruments, the Schiro Curriculum Ideology Instrument (2013) and the iTEaCH Instrument (Choy, 2013), this causal-comparative research study analyzed data collected from both full-time and part-time faculty at a private liberal arts institution. Through the application of a one-way ANOVA and Tukey-Kramer post hoc test, the results identified statistically significant differences among several of the curriculum ideology types and the adoption of technology in the classroom. Insight into the relationship between curriculum ideology and technology adoption can be used both by technologists and pedagogical specialists as part of technology deployments to improve not only the use of technology in the classroom but also enabling faculty seeking opportunities to change the classroom dynamic focusing more on students and opportunities for individual learning.

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Ed.D. Dissertation

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