One-to-one laptop initiatives in education are increasing across the world. Governments and/or schools are initiating projects which provide students with personal laptop computers for use at home and school. According to Penuel (2006), the crucial features of one-to-one laptop environments are: (1) provide students with use of portable laptop computers (or digital devices) loaded with contemporary productivity software; (2) enable students to access the Internet through schools’ wireless networks, and (3) a focus on using laptops to complete academic tasks such as homework assignments, tests, and presentations.

Fleischer (2013), added an additional criterion to Penuel’s definition regarding that the computer must be used in a personal manner meaning that one person must have access to the same computer at all times, with the same settings, programs and folder structure.

 There are several arguments to promote such one-to-one laptop implementations, e.g., to meet the digital divide (i.e., unequal access to technology), technology as a catalytist (i.e., ICT as a tool to accelerate educational innovations; Hawkridge, 1990), the social rationale (i.e., prepare the students to become responsible and well-informed citizens; Griffin et al., 2012), the economic rationale (i.e., prepare the students for future work life; OECD, 2010) and the educational rationale (i.e., open new opportunities that improve teaching and learning).

Given the large number of one-to-one laptop programs, researchers have been interested among others in the effects of one-to-one laptop environments on students’ learning and motivation (Fleischer, 2012; Zheng, Warschauer, Lin, & Chang, 2016), and teachers’ use of ICT, self-efficacy and development in teaching and learning practices (Fleischer, 2012; Penuel, 2006; Zheng et al., 2016). However, to our knowledge few studies have investigated teachers’ readiness for classroom management and teaching in one-to-one classrooms.

This study follows teachers and students in a large municipality which has initiated a one-to-one laptop initiative across all grades 1-12. The research group will follow the one-to-one project across three years. Based on existing knowledge regarding teachers’ ICT integration in classrooms, and the importance of the relations to teachers’ computer self-efficacy, perceived usefulness of ICT, and attitudes towards ICT, the researchers developed a survey to investigate a new construct which aims at measuring teachers’ readiness for one-to-one laptop environments.

Hence, the aim of this study is twofold: (1) To investigate the validity and reliability of the one-to-one readiness construct; (2) To examine the relations between the one-to-one readiness construct and computer self-efficacy, perceived usefulness and attitudes (external validity), along with the differences across teachers’ gender, the subject the teach, and grade at which they teach.

With regard to the first research objective, an approach comprising of four stages of scale development was taken to analyse the data consisting of 800 teachers (455 female - 345 male). During the first stage, an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted. To take the ordinal nature of the Likert-items (polytomous data) into account, polychoric factor analysis was used. Following the guidelines of Osborne and Fitzpatrick (2012) on the stability of EFA solutions, an internal replication EFA was conducted on the sample. For this purpose, the sample was proportionally divided into three subsamples, students evenly distributed over all the schools. The EFA replication analysis was conducted on subsample 1 and 2. Subsample 3 was used for the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) in the second stage. The threshold of structural replicability – the same basic factor structure should be replicated for all subsamples - and the threshold of replicability of factor loadings across subsamples were used. During the second stage of analysis, a polytomous CFA was conducted to assess whether the proposed factor structure of the EFAs fits the data well. Several fit indices were calculated, such as the Goodness of Fit Index (GFI), the Adjusted Goodness of Fit Index (AGFI), the Tucker–Lewis index (TLI), the comparative fit index (CFI) and the RMSEA (Bentler, 1990; Floyd and Widaman, 1995). In the third stage of analysis, ordinal alphas were calculated as these estimate the reliability more accurately than Cronbach’s alpha for ordinal response scales such as Likert-type scales (Gadermann, Guhn, & Zumbo, 2012). Finally, in the fourth stage of analysis, a differential item functioning (DIF) analysis (Van den Noortgate & De Boeck, 2005) was conducted to explore measurement equivalence among subgroups of the test takers. More specifically, the TAM-package in R was used to investigate whether female teachers have a different probability of answering the items correctly compared to their male counterparts, while controlling for their total score on the one-to-one scale. With regard to the second research objective, a regression analysis with a multilevel design was conducted to examine the relations between the one-to-one readiness construct and computer self-efficacy, perceived usefulness and attitudes.

This study will provide detailed information on teachers’ readiness to classroom management and teaching in one-to-one laptop environments, and how the 1:1 construct behaves in relation to variables such as self-efficacy, perceived usefulness and attitudes. Moreover, differences across teachers’ gender, subject and grades will be investigated to provide knowledge about the need for potential teacher development support. This can also provide researchers and educators with crucial knowledge in order to plan relevant interventions that promote the empowerment of teachers to use ICT for teaching and leading one-to-one laptop classrooms which may also bring challenges such as distractive behavior (Fleischer, 2012). Further implications for both research and practice will be discussed.

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