School Technology Needs Assessment (STNA)

 

Background

The School Technology Needs Assessment (STNA, say "Stenna") was developed by SEIR*TEC at SERVE in collaboration with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction's Educational Technology Division, as part of the LANCET project (Looking at North Carolina Educational Technology).

The STNA was created to help building-level planners collect and analyze needs data related to implementation of the NC IMPACT technology integration model, as well as other contemporary frameworks for examining technology use in teaching and learning.

Appropriate Uses

The STNA is specifically intended to determine the collective needs of a school staff related to the use of technology in education settings. It provides information to help school-level planners - administrators, technology and media specialists, and school or technology planning team members - make purchasing, resource allocation, or other decisions relating to technology. Its most important use however, is guiding building- and district-level decisions about professional development for educators, including those about content, timing, and type of opportunities provided.

It is not appropriate to use the STNA in any attempt to determine individual teachers' skills with, understandings of, or attitudes about technology, nor should this instrument be used to compare schools or staff members.

Data and Reporting

The STNA collects perceptive data - what respondents think - about a variety of broad areas of technology implementation in their school:

• Conditions influencing technology use
• Professional development opportunities offered and taken advantage of
• Patterns of teacher practice, with respect to technology in teaching and learning
• The nature of student activities with classroom technology
• The impact of technology on teaching practice and student outcomes

Analysis of data provides a picture of the school as a whole - not of individual staff members - presented as frequencies and percentages of responses to all items, and bar graph representations of those values.

Even though the paper and pencil version of the STNA codes numerical data, it should not be analyzed by calculating averages or any other statistic. For example, the mean of a set of STNA item responses is completely meaningless, since a value of 3 could be achieved by any number of frequency distributions. Frequencies and percentages (as reported by the online STNA) are much more meaningful.

The PDF guide to Interpreting STNA Data is provided to help school planning teams make well-founded decisions about technology initiative implementations. This document illustrates a range of sample item response profiles and describes how they might best be interpreted.

Using the STNA in Your School

A PDF step-by-step checklist for Implementing STNA in Your School is available to help guide deployment of STNA in your school, and the instrument itself is available either online or as a PDF document, ready for duplication and distribution to respondents.

To use the online STNA, to arrange for initialization of your school's individual STNA. Be prepared to provide some specific information:

• The name of your school
• The number of respondents expected to complete the STNA
• The date on which staff members may start responding
• The date on which responses should end

Once the response period has ended, a report url is provided only to the original school contact. Data is not used for any other purpose without express consent of school administrators.

A sample of the online STNA is available for review. Note that, while it is completely functional and may be completed and submitted, no data will be reported to SEIR*TEC or to the visitor reviewing the instrument.

You may also view a sample STNA online report, to see how results will be organized, once your school staff has completed the survey. Note that the current version of the STNA (v.2.1) omits the Professional Profile items because, in some rare instances, it became possible to identify individual respondents in the standard report.

To deploy the paper-and-pencil STNA, download and freely distribute the PDF version of the document, noting that frequencies and percentages must be calculated manually for this version of the instrument.

If you have questions or comments, contact This page last updated 17-Jan-2006