Investigation of the Reasons for Students’ Attitudes towards the Interactive Whiteboard Use in Mathematics Classrooms

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate the reasons of the students’ attitudes towards interactive whiteboard (IWB) use in mathematics classrooms in middle schools and high schools. For this purpose the effect of IWB’s features, students’ mathematics anxiety, teachers’ ICT integration, students’ mathematics achievement and gender to students’ attitudes towards use of interactive whiteboard were investigated. This study is a descriptive research designed as a relational survey method. The research sampling consisted of 350 students in middle schools and 557 students in high schools in Balikesir. The Attitude and Characteristics of IWB scale to measure the students’ attitudes and the perceived features of IWB was used. Also the Mathematics Anxiety scale that consists of five items was used to measure students’ mathematics anxiety. To determine the students’ opinions about the teachers’ technology integration approaches, the ICT integration approaches scale was used. In order to determine the structural validity of scales, confirmatory factor analysis was conducted. In order to determine the relation between the students’ attitudes toward IWB use and independent variables, multiple regression analysis was conducted separately for the data collected from middle schools and high schools. According to the results of regressions analysis of the data collected from middle school students, IWB’s characteristics, traditional ICT integration and math achievement are positive predictors and mathematics anxiety is negative predictor of students’ attitudes. The results for high school students show that features of IWB and gender are predictors of students’ attitudes. This study has several implications for teachers about reasons of students’ attitudes towards IWB use in mathematics classrooms, so that they could have effect on students’ attitudes and organize their classroom environment. Also that kind of studies leads the use of information and communication technologies and help to plan the future investments for educational technologies effectively.