There is growing consensus among education leaders worldwide that traditional models of teaching and learning must change in order to help youth develop the skills they will need to succeed in the 21st century, and that the use of ICT is an essential enabler to this goal. Research, however, continues to show that many countries are experiencing a gap between the rhetoric of educational change and the reality of classroom practice. This symposium describes early results from Innovative Teaching and Learning (ITL) Research, a multi-year program to investigate the factors that promote technology-supported educational reform within and across diverse country contexts.

The research program is based on a conceptual framework that draws extensively on prior multinational research (e.g., SITES (Law, Pelgrum, & Plomp, 2006), PISA (OECD, 2006)) and on global frameworks for ICT-enabled teaching and 21st century learning (e.g., UNESCO, 2008; Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2004; Government of South Australia, 2008). Research questions examine the relationship between innovative teaching practices and 21st century learning outcomes, and the school‐level conditions and national or regional supports that promote teachers’ successful adoption of these practices. Innovative teaching practices are defined for the purposes of this study as comprising student‐centered pedagogies, learning opportunities that transcend the school walls, and the integration of ICT into teaching and learning. Prior research has linked these constructs extensively to positive outcomes for students in terms of development of 21st century skills (e.g., Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999). ICT access and use are investigated not as ends in themselves, but within the context of the student-centered teaching practices they can support when used in powerful ways.

ITL Research uses a distributed design to carry out research that is at once global and local in scope. A global research organization is responsible for design, coordination, and results synthesis, and a competitively‐selected national partner in each of eight countries carries out the local research, creating local design plans and adapting instruments as required to ensure that the research is appropriate to the country context and serves local as well as global needs. For a systemic understanding of educational reform, this study employs mixed methods that include surveys of approximately 650 teachers in each country, as well as their school leaders; interviews and observations of a smaller subset of those educators; student focus groups; and a unique method of analyzing artifacts of actual classroom practice—samples of learning activities and student work—to characterize the degree to which 21st century skills are being encouraged and learned.

This symposium includes presentations of country-specific results in three participating countries—Finland, the United Kingdom, and Russia—that will highlight the opportunities and challenges of ICT-supported educational change that are both strikingly similar and strikingly unique across national borders.  All papers include data collected in the 2010-11 school year; Finland and Russia also participated in the 2009-10 pilot year of the study, and those countries' papers will include data from both years. The symposium discussant will add reflections from the context of education in Ireland.