3.10.2022

Digitalisation and Inclusion in Education- national survey for teaching staff

The survey focuses on how technology can be used to foster inclusion and educational equity in schools and it is aimed at teaching staff at all educational levels, excluding higher education institutions.

Please respond according to your own background and experience. Your participation is entirely voluntary and you may refuse to take part in the research or exit the survey without needing to give a reason. You are free to decline to answer any particular question you do not wish to answer for any reason. Your responses will be anonymized by removing any personal information. No single participant or institution will be identifiable in the results, which will be published in scientific publications.

The survey will take approximately 25 minutes to fill in: https://forms.office.com/r/8TRRmC9paF

The project Digital Technologies and Inclusive Education (Dig-In-Clusive)

Today, digital technologies and inclusive education are espoused as important tenets in teaching and learning. Digital technologies can promote teaching and learning and inclusive education ensures equal educational opportunity and equality of outcomes. However, the Covid-19 lockdown highlighted the digital inequalities within society and how that in turn impacted remote teaching and learning. The question remains whether and how digital technologies can be used to foster inclusive practices in schools.

This project Digital Technologies and Inclusive Education (Dig-In-Clusive) seeks to address this research gap. The overarching aim of the project is to understand how digital technology, including games, is or can be used to foster teaching and learning. In particular, we are interested in how these tools can be used to foster the inclusion of all students, in teaching and learning, in all subjects in schools. The specific focuses of the project are:

• To gauge the current use of digital technologies in Finnish schools
• Understand how digital tools are used to foster inclusion and education equity in Finnish schools.
• Determine how digital technology fostered or inhibited teaching and learning during the Covid-19 lockdown.
• The role of digital games in teaching and learning, the kinds of training received by teachers and for what purposes digital games are used.

This innovative research seeks to push the boundaries of research on how digital technologies can be used to enhance universal access to education and ensure educational equity. Towards this aim, in the autumn of 2022, the team of researchers at the Åbo Akademi University are conducting a national survey that focuses on how digital technology can be used to foster inclusion and educational equity in schools. The survey is designed for teaching staff at all levels of education excluding higher education institutions.

Project group: 
Emmanuel Acquah, Associate Professor of Education with a focus on minority research, ÅAU
Anette Bengs, research project coordinator, Experience Lab, ÅAU
Matilda Ståhl, PhD in educational sciences, post-doctoral researcher at Experience Lab, ÅAU