Assessing Teachers Technology Acceptance and Usage Behavior of Current Job-Related Technologies

Teachers use technology to provide different learning methods to cater to individual students' learning strengths and styles. In many school districts, teachers are critical stakeholders in the success of technology implementations. Successful technology initiatives depend on teachers' motivation, knowledge, and skills to implement and utilize job-related technologies. Many studies suggest that users' acceptances and perceived usability are factors impacting their usage behavior of such technologies. While some studies focus on teachers' technology integration as well as their barriers and attitudes toward using technology in the classroom, few studies examine teachers' interactions and usability of the technologies they are currently using. This study relies on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) which evaluates users' perceived usefulness, ease of use, attitudes, and perceptions on their intentional or actual usage of particular technologies. This study validates previous TAM research by finding that teachers' acceptance directly influences their usage behavior. To gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between the user and their usage behavior, we extended the original TAM variables by including additional usability and attitudinal measures. We also explore the less often discussed external variables that have an impact on teachers' acceptance. We find that by including these additional measures we are better able to explain more of the variance than the original model. By expanding the original perceived ease of use variable to include learnability, memorability, functionality and navigation, we find that the new variable explains much more of the variance in attitudes toward use of a particular technology. Moreover, we find that an examination of the external variables provide an explanation of both the original and new perceived ease of use variables. This finding suggests that external variables play an important role in understand teachers' perceived usability. While other studies have not confirmed this finding on every group of technology users, the influence of the external variables may vary depending on both the evaluated technology and targeted population. Nonetheless, we recommend that this new model for future TAM researchers, technology designers, and school districts. In particular, stakeholders can use TAM research to assess teachers' utilization of previous and future technology investments