Understanding Students' and Teachers' Approaches to Tablet Use in Turkish Secondary Schools: A Model Based Approach

Rapidly developing and widely used mobile technologies have been changing the way we live and learn. Such devices were banned from schools not long ago, and now, they are becoming part of everyday practice in schools. Governments around the world have been increasingly investing in learning technologies with the belief that teachers and students will eventually benefit from them (Diemer, Fernandez & Streepay, 2012; Pedró, 2010). However, these investments do not always result as desired. Turkey, where this research took place, is one of the countries that has invested in ICT through a program called the “Movement of Enhancing Opportunities and Improving Technology”, known as the FATIH Project. With the Fatih project the government had aimed to revolutionise the education by ‘upgrading’ the classrooms with the latest technology smartboards and providing students and teachers with a personal tablet. It is one of the most expensive and extensive government supported ICT projects ever taken place (Tamim, Borokhovski, Pickup & Bernard, 2015), and it is important to understand the perceptions of the end users. In order to collect information on students’ and teachers’ attitudes towards tablets a qualitative study with teacher interviews, student focus group sessions and observations was conducted. Moreover, lately ‘technology acceptance models’ have taken their places in education research with the claim that they could help to foresee the acceptance behaviour before developing or introducing a new technology by providing measurable variables; therefore, avoiding unexpected user rejection (Jan & Contreras, 2011). In this regard, this research aims to test the applicability of an existing model the ‘Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2’ (UTAUT2), which has been commonly used by educational researchers, and is suggested to be more suitable to educational account. In that sense, this part of the research has a quantitative nature. Data were collected through questionnaires from secondary school students (n=266) and analysed in accordance with the qualitative data collected with this research and the previous literature. It is believed that theoretical findings of this research will help researchers to understand if a model approach is suitable for education, if so, will help to develop a model that corresponds to the requirements of educational research. Additionally, the findings of this study will help the Turkish government in understanding the expectations and perceptions of the students and teachers regarding the tablet use in education