What are the relationships among gender, age, teaching experience, frequency of e-mail use, administrator’s e-mail use, classroom e-mail access, grade level/subject taught, school socioeconomic level and teacher perceptions of e-mail as a method of communication with parents?
For this question, the researcher focused on identifying differences in teachers’ perceptions of e-mail use in communication wit
h parents based on demographic and other personal characteristics. For instance, the researcher sought to understand whether being a female teacher made one more or less likely to approve the use of e-mail communication with parents of students with ASD. In addition, the researcher wanted to understand if being in the teaching professional for a longer time, which translated to a greater teacher-parent interaction experience, had any bearing on the teachers’ approval or disapproval of e-mail technology as an ideal method of communication between teachers and parents (Sheridan et al., 2013). In addition, the question puts into consideration a range of other variables that could have a significant influence on the use of e-mail communication. For instance, the researcher also investigated the impact of age on the teachers’ preference of e-mail method of communication because of the belief that younger teachers were more likely to favor internet-based forms of communication than older teachers.
An important variable in the responses given by the participants was the significant disparities based on their gender. For instance, male and female teachers demonstrated significant differences in their ratings, including a considerably higher mean rank for men, who disagreed with the statement that “The message of the e-mail is easily misinterpreted,” compared to their female counterparts at p=.025. Given the gender-aligned differences in the participants’ perception of the ease of misinterpreting e-mails, it was unsurprising that female teachers had a relatively lower agreement level on whether e-mail was a suitable method for communicating with parents. A similar trend was reflected in the lower level agreement among female respondents on the statement that “E-mail is suitable way of relaying commendable learners work to parents.” Based on this, it is evident that male teachers had a comparatively higher opinion of the use of e-mail in communicating with parents compared to their female counterparts.
Younger teachers tended to have more positive perceptions towards email use, which was not very surprising given the shift towards digital communication in the more recent years. However, there were only significant pairwise differences for two of the items on the scale, suggesting that age did not impact perceptions as much as one might anticipate before seeing the data. In addition, there were two statements on the survey that indicated those with more teaching experience viewed email more negatively than teachers with fewer years of teaching experience. This isn’t very surprising because years of teaching experience and age are theoretically directly related. However, what was surprising was that the two items with significant differences for teaching experience were different from the two items with significant differences for age. This suggests that future research should be conducted focusing on age and years of teaching experience related to perceptions of email as a form of communication in the classroom.
In addition, not surprisingly, teachers who used email more frequently had more positive perceptions related to email use in the classroom. This suggests that the more the teachers utilize email, the more benefits they receive. Another possibility is that teachers with preconceived notions about email use in the classroom choose not to use email. Further research should be conducted to determine the direction of this relationship. Furthermore, when assessing the relationship between administration approval and perceptions of email use, the results were also as expected. Teachers who reported that their administration approved to email use in the classroom tended to have more positive perceptions of email use than those who reported that their administration did not approve of email use in the classroom.
Regarding the relationship between access to email and perceptions of email as a method of communication in the classroom, the results were once again, as expected. Those with access to email in the classroom tended to have more positive perceptions of email. However, similar to the relationship involving frequency of email use, further research should be conducted to determine if the administration approval has a causal role in the positive perceptions. Finally, the lack of significant differences in the last to analyses was surprising, as this related to teachers’ education level and grade taught. It seems intuitive that those with a higher level of education would have been taught more about email use in the classroom and therefore tend to have more positive views, but this was not the case. In addition, it would be expected for grade level taught to impact the use of email as different aged students require different forms of communication, but this was also not the case in this sample. Overall, there were a range of significant results that need to be studied further on their own to determine the nature of the relationships.