INTEGRAZIONE DI TABLET NELLA SCUOLA PRIMARIA: LEZIONI APPRESE DA UNA DESIGN-BASED RESEARCH

Integrating technology into classrooms for learning purposes is an ongoing educational challenge. Tablets are among the most attractive technological devices in school settings. They are chosen by teachers for their portability, ease of access to information, multitouch screen, and readiness for collaborative work. However, research has largely demonstrated how the success of learning with technologies does not depend on the simple adoption and availability of the devices in the classroom, but on how teachers integrate them into teaching. For these reasons, the topic of teacher training in digital competence must be placed at the center of the discussion about the integration of technologies in education. As recently emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic, unfortunately teachers still do not possess sufficient competence in this area based on the current demands of the digital age. Hence, it is important to intensify investments in training teachers’ digital competence through more effective professional development (PD) pathways. Furthermore, given the lack of guidelines in the literature on the effective pedagogical use of tablets, it is necessary to make research efforts on this aspect to guide the integration of this device into teaching. Based on these theoretical premises, the present study concerned a tablet integration initiative in a first-grade classroom (s.y. 2021-2022) of an elementary school in the Veneto Region. The objective was twofold: 1) to determine the impacts of the initiative on teachers’ classroom practices, and on pupils’ learning, and 2) to identify principles for future tablet integration initiatives. Specifically, the socio-constructivist learning theory has been used as an interpretative lens through which the impact on teachers’ teaching practices have been investigated, in terms of shift from teacher-centered to student-centered methodological choices. Thus, the initiative was conceived and developed as a PD pathway for teachers in integrating the devices into their teaching practices. Design-Based Research (DBR) was chosen to implement and refine the research. The one-year-and-a-half DBR involved 2 in-service teachers, an experimental group of 23 first-grade pupils, and a control group of 17 students with similar background characteristics. The research was informed by the literature review and context analysis, as well as by the study of a school case expert in integrating this device for instructional purposes. Mixed methods for data collection have been used: 1) classroom observation, 2) focus groups, 3) interviews, 4) tests, and 5) questionnaires. The results revealed that teachers’ teaching practices shifted slightly in the direction of more student-centered methods, even with the integration of the tablet. In contrast, the final assessment on students’ learning found medium to high-performance levels on a class basis, but significantly lower than pre-DBR. Considering these findings, it is deemed necessary to initiate further, more time-dilated researches to observe the evolution of both teachers’ and students’ practices on learning and more directed toward the methodological training of teachers. Principles for future tablet integration initiatives in teaching-learning processes in other school settings are described.