Press room

The study was presented today in Madrid in an act presided over by the Minister of Education, Ángel Gabilondo, also with the participation of Javier Nadal, executive vice president of the Telefónica Foundation, and Imma Tubella, President of the UOC.

This report is the result of data obtained, between March and September 2007, in the framework of an empirical research study carried out using a representative sample of 809 Spanish educational institutions. A total of 17,575 people participated (694 headmasters/mistresses of primary and secondary schools; 1,697 teachers and 15,185 students). The size and design of the sample of this research provides statistically representative results for the primary and ESO (secondary) stages of the whole of the Spanish educational system, with small margins of error (±3,4% at the level of the centre and directorial team, ±2,4% for teaching staff and ±0,8% in the case of students).

Significant conclusions of the study

→ The use of ICTs and especially of internet in Spanish primary and secondary schools has shown some progress in the last few years.
The extent and frequency of their use today is, clearly, greater than what we were able to observe in the first years of this decade. Thus, approximately one out of every four centres use ICTs with sufficient frequency and breadth such that their use has a notable bearing on educational practices and may give rise to potentially innovative experiences relative to teaching and learning processes. In addition, 46.80% of centres are incorporating ICTs in the majority of subjects.

→ However, the incorporation of ICTs in educational activities, and particularly their use in classrooms, has not advanced as quickly as envisaged by expectations and growth in investment. Thus, 28.50% of teachers assert that they never use ICTs in the classroom; 30.00% say that they do so occasionally; 15.10% monthly and 26.40% weekly.

→ ICTs are present in the majority of Spanish educational institutions and are used on a daily basis in performing administrative tasks and in class preparation by teachers. Students also use them frequently for carrying out academic tasks at home. In general terms, teachers and students show mastery of digital competences and use ICTs much more frequently in their private activities than the mean of the Spanish population.

→ Nevertheless, the presence of ICTs in classrooms continues to be scarce: only one out of every three students in primary and obligatory secondary education use computers at least once a week in their whole set of subjects (only one out of every four when it comes to internet). For the remaining two thirds, ICTs do not have a prominent presence in their school activities, or they simply have no presence at all.

→ Educational institutions have an endowment of ICT resources (especially computers, with a ratio of 7.58 in Primary and 7.45 in ESO) close to the European average, however, there is a lack of accessibility from the classrooms and from homes. There is a lack of resources adapted to teaching and specialized software.

→ ICTs are used fundamentally as a support in the presentation of contents by faculty (support to oral presentation; in conversations with students; in the presentation of contents through multimedia systems). Nevertheless, the use of ICTs as a powerful set of multimedia tools in the service of educational innovation and improvement in students’ learning is still quite far from being a reality.

→ Internet is basically used by students for searching for information. The use of ICTs for interaction between students and teachers, for collaboration beyond the classroom, for work in teams and for creation and publication of contents by students is not at all frequent in our schools.

→ Aside from continuing to grow in terms of endowments of ICT resources and infrastructures, and situating these resources within reach of students in their usual work places and from their homes, there are other needs that must be met in order to promote a significant advance in the use of these technologies for educational purposes; such as, for example, teachers themselves, who demonstrate a more than acceptable instrumental mastery of ICTs, although they admit to certain important gaps in their competences for using these technologies as didactic instruments and as tools in the service of their students’ learning. Only one out of every three teachers, for example, feels qualified for promoting and supervising work groups using ICTs, or for creating online resources that can be useful in their subjects. More than half of faculty do not feel capable of developing multimedia projects with their students, or of evaluating projects carried out by means of these technologies.

→ The majority of faculty that use ICTs in their classes state that they have adopted them, above all, as a support in educational activities that they had already been carrying out without them. Adoption of ICTs as instruments for innovation in centres and classrooms is not widespread. In this case, the question is not situated strictly in the ICTs but in the teaching practices that are predominant in our primary and secondary schools. Practices of a traditional nature, in which the leadership role falls on the teacher who tries to convey knowledge to their students, in a fundamentally expository way, fit poorly with intensive use of ICTs by students and with a high level of exploitation of digital technologies.

→ A better exploitation of the possibilities of ICTs occurs when teaching practices give a much greater role to learners themselves; when students have the possibility to share and contrast their own knowledge in cooperative groups, or extending their relations of exchange beyond their class or school, working on lengthy interdisciplinary projects; when the acquiring of skills related to access, selection and management of information is promoted, taking into account the current degree of digitalization of knowledge available and its modes of representation; when, in short, greater impetus is given to the creativity and autonomous learning of students. The question lies in the capacity for innovation of educational practices, without which the potential of ICTs remains seriously limited. In this sense, it is especially necessary to foster and divulge more energetically, by way of example for the whole of the system, those experiences that have known how to incorporate ICTs in favour of educational innovation, in order to facilitate the solution of the multiple problems that are presented on a daily basis to our educators.

→ Headmasters/mistresses, teachers and students have high expectations regarding the potential of ICTs for improving education. All of them coincide in pointing out that these technologies will be very important for education of the future, but the reality is that they do not quite know how to fit them into their daily school activities. The lack of the relation, as seen by both students and teachers (two out of three, in the case of teachers), between the use of ICTs and obtaining better academic results is disturbingly surprising. This lack of relation reveals that, at this moment in time, ICTs do not appear to be essential for the achievement of the objectives of primary education. Educational curriculums, teaching methods and evaluation systems, which guide the actions of faculty, do not appear to have evolved at the same rate as new forms of access to information and knowledge.

→ Moreover, two thirds of the educational institutions (60.5%) do not dispose of a specific plan for the introduction of ICTs. The majority of headmasters/mistresses coincide in that the strategies and priorities used for integrating ICTs in their institutions involve, primarily, giving impetus to training faculty in ICT competences (81.80%); quite a few also view the need to change the organization of spaces (52.60%) and teaching methods (47.70%) and also, though to a lesser degree, they contemplate the desirability of promoting interdisciplinary educational projects (36.50%) and of opening the centre to the surrounding environment (34.20%) taking advantage of the potential of these technologies.