January 2012 Volume 15 Number 1 - Educational Technology ...

Instrument and data collection
After an extensive literature review of instruments utilized in different educational backgrounds (Jones and Clarke,
1994; Robertson et al., 1995; Sooknanan, 2002; Isleem, 2003; Dudeney and Hockly, 2007), a questionnaire was
developed by the researchers to gather data about the perceptions of prospective EFL teachers in distance higher
education toward ICT integration, rather than using an existing one. The questionnaire consisted of two parts. The
first part asked about personal information such as gender, age and year of education to ensure maximum control of
variables (Gay & Airasian, 2000). The second part of the questionnaire contained nine items based on a 5-point
Likert scale (from 1=strongly disagree to 5= strongly agree). The development of the instrument was guided by a
number of experts working in higher education settings. This panel of experts, including two professors of
educational technology, two native experts and two non-native senior EFL teachers, evaluated the instrument for
content and face validity and contended that the questionnaire was appropriate and comprehensive for the context of
the study. To check the reliability, the instrument was analyzed through the Cronbach’s Alpha Coefficient α = 0.90,
which showed a high level of reliability.
The questionnaires were administered to the prospective EFL teachers at OEF (N=120) through the Internet because
they were in different parts of Turkey during December 2009. The return rate from OEF student teachers was 70.8%
(N=85). After rigorous analysis of the collected data, 30 of these prospective teachers were contacted again to get
their phone numbers for the interview session. The purpose of the interviews was to cross-check students’ responses
to the questionnaire and obtain further information on their responses. 73.3 % of the contacted prospective EFL
teachers (N=22) agreed to have an interview on the phone. Even though an interview via video chat tools was
planned, it was not used since some of the prospective EFL teachers did not have equal opportunities to access any
video chat tools. These twenty-two respondents were interviewed throughout three weeks and their responses to the
interview questions were transcribed as we had no chance to record their answers. The questions that we posed in the
interview were as follows:
1. What obstructs your positive perceptions toward ICT integration ?
2. Do you think that learning ICT use at a distance is a disadvantage?
3. What do you suggest to better learn how to integrate ICT?
Data analysis
Data were analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS. 16). The demographic variables for this
study were discrete data (nominal and ordinal); therefore, descriptive statistics were utilized to run for frequencies,
percentages, mean and standard deviation (Beins, 2004; Heiman, 2001; Sekaran, 2003).
Results
Students’ scores on questionnaire
Table 2. Distribution of mean scores on the perceptions of prospective EFL teachers at the distance higher education
context toward ICT integration
Items Mean Standard Deviation Standard Error Mean
Item 1 3.40 0.49 0.05
Item 2 2.14 0.35 0.03
Item 3 4.07 0.65 0.07
Item 4 1.89 0.61 0.06
Item 5 2.84 0.74 0.08
Item 6 3.57 0.77 0.08
Item 7 3.57 0.77 0.08
Item 8 2.52 0.50 0.05
Item 9 2.52 0.50 0.05
Overall attitude 2.77 0.19 0.02
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