A Factor Analysis of Teacher Competency in Technology

Background: In the 21st Century, more and more citizens are expected to use technology to access and communicate information, and they manage electronic information from an ever-widening range of resources and in a wide variety of formats. Teachers' integration of technology is stalled by the lack of successful development opportunities in the constructs of technology and pedagogy. In Thailand, there are many studies that aimed at integrating ICT into teaching to solve the problem of lacking ICT competencies. Aims: To analyze factors of teacher competency in technology. Sample: The Sample were 317 secondary school teachers from Islamic private schools at Pattani province Thailand in academic year 2011 which was selected by stratified random sampling procedure. Method: Frequencies and exploratory factor analysis were used in the study. The KMO result indicated that the sampling was quite adequate. The Varimax rotation was used. Cronbach Alpha reliabilities for overall factors were 0.876. The data was analyzed using program R version 2.13.2. Results: The results for the factor analysis for this measure yielded a three factor solution with eigenvalues greater than 1.0 and the total variance explained was 30.327% of the total variance. KMO measure of sampling adequacy was 0.779 indicating sufficient intercorrelations while the Bartlett's Test of Sphericity was significant (Chi square = 1850.599, p less than 0.01). Conclusion: This study was analyzed to ascertain the factors of teacher competency in technology of secondary school teachers in Pattani province Thailand. Three factor themes emerged through data collection and analysis factors that were studied include basic technology operation, personal use of technology tools and teaching of technology. Hence, the results of this study have implications for the schools to take into consideration teachers' competency when encouraging them to use technology. (Contains 5 tables.)