Volume Two - Academic Conferences

3.1 The inner factors
Caroline Stockman and Fred Truyen
3.1.1 Beliefs
Though research has argued that the belief system of the teacher is an adequate factor for prediction
of behaviour towards technology (Judson, 2006; Roehrig et al., 2007; Haney et al.,2002), this paper
states it is only the beginning, as there are a lot more elements at stake and the teaching methods,
notions and prejudices which the teacher adheres as defined by past experience, will only determine
if the teacher will start at a high or low place in the spiral. Though a connection to the belief system
and the adoption process has been proven to correlate (a more traditional approach is said to have a
negative impact on the integration) (Liu, 2011; Tondeur, Hermans & Van Braak, 2008), it has also
been established that the integration of technology by teachers with a claim to student-centered,
constructivist methods and beliefs, does not result automatically in powerful, innovative or effective
teaching (Cuban, Kirkpatrick & Peck, 2001; Hermans, Tondeur, van Braak & Valcke, 2008).
During the survey on educational gaming in Belgium, teachers were asked to express their opinion on
five different statements about games.
Firstly, the statement : “Games stimulate aggressive behaviour", which is a common prejudice, readily
reinforced by public media and inherent to a 'moral panic' perspective. As our current focus is not on
the object, we will not discuss whether there is truth in that statement, only what the teachers believe
to be true.
The results show that teachers are cautious in their judgment. Roughly a third of them ‘neither agrees
nor disagrees’, while another 30% disagrees to some level.
Half of the participants also ‘disagrees’ with the statement that “You can’t learn anything from a video
game”, as show in graph A. If you add the number of teachers who ‘strongly disagreed’ with that
statement, you come to 68% of the participants who actually do believe in the educational potential of
games.
Figure 2: Opinion results to didactic potential of video games
Overall, teachers' attitude towards video games was fairly open, yet despite this largely positive
attitude, only three teachers of all participants said to have used video games in their lessons. This
shows there are more factors at play. When it came to language labs, very few teachers expressed
prejudice towards the technology, the main concern being isolation of the learners, amongst
themselves and towards the teacher. It is important to understand that these prejudices can lead to
misunderstandings about technology and its educational use. The inner disagreement becomes (yet
again) very clear when one Belgian RS teacher thoughtfully said her children "think they learn English
while playing. One of them is even pursuing higher education in English because gaming encouraged
him to it.", though during the same interview, she added dismissively that "kids already play enough
games in their spare time as it is."
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