Notes on the 2011 findings: Innovative Teaching and Learning Research

What the programme measured across seven countries, what it concluded, and why it is still cited.

ITL Research is an independent project. It is not affiliated with Microsoft, SRI International, UNESCO, or the former Innovative Teaching and Learning Research programme.

The document

Shear, L., Gallagher, L., Patel, D., & Fullan, M. (2011). Innovative Teaching and Learning Research: 2011 Findings and Implications. Report of the ITL Research programme (Microsoft Partners in Learning / SRI International). The file is a 40-page report exported from a slide deck, dated January 2012 in its own document metadata.

The archived file is served from this site, at the path the original links used, so that readers arriving from a decade-old citation get the document itself rather than a summary of it: Innovative Teaching and Learning Research: 2011 Findings and Implications (PDF, 40 pages). The pages below summarise its argument and context.

Rights and provenance. This document is the work of its named authors and was published by Microsoft Partners in Learning with SRI International; no copyright or licence notice appears in the file itself. All rights remain with the authors and rights holders. It is served here for research and bibliographic purposes, with attribution, from the public web archive copy whose content digest was verified against the archive's own record. Permission to redistribute this document was not obtained and is not claimed: it is published here on the archive's own responsibility, without a licence, because a decade of live citations points at this path and the honest answer to them is the document itself rather than a summary of it. Rights holders who want the file removed or the description changed can request it through the domain's registration contact, and it will be actioned.

What was studied

The programme's design combined classroom observation with teacher and student surveys and with measures of student outcomes, so that the relationship between technology use, teaching practice and learning could be examined together rather than one factor at a time. The 2011 report covers the first full research year, collected in seven countries chosen to include both high-income and emerging systems, in order to test whether the same patterns appeared in very different school conditions.

Contemporary coverage of the study by education technology press, including THE Journal, reported the scale of that year's data collection as more than 4,000 teachers and around 150 school administrators, alongside lesson observations and samples of student work. Those figures describe the published study, not this archive.

How practice was described

The study did not treat “technology use” as a single variable. Lessons were coded for what students were asked to do with knowledge and with technology, using the rubric dimensions that later became the 21CLD framework: knowledge construction, collaboration, self-regulation, real-world problem solving and innovation, skilled communication, and ICT used for learning. That coding scheme is the reason the report is still useful: it separates “the room has devices” from “students used the devices to build something they could not have built without them”.

What the findings said

• Access to technology on its own was not associated with more innovative teaching. Devices in a classroom changed nothing about practice unless the tasks set for students changed too.
• Innovative practice clustered: teachers whose lessons scored high on one dimension tended to score higher on others, which argues against treating the six dimensions as independent interventions to be added one at a time.
• Student use of ICT for knowledge construction — producing, modelling, analysing, designing — was the least common pattern observed, even in well-equipped schools, and remained the dimension with the largest gap between basic and advanced practice.
• System conditions mattered. Curriculum expectations, assessment demands and the availability of professional support shaped whether innovative practice survived beyond a single enthusiastic teacher.
• The most consistent predictor of innovative practice was not the technology available but what teachers were asked and supported to do with it.

Why it is still cited

The report is quoted in teacher-education literature, in development-sector writing about education technology, and in later studies that reuse its coding dimensions. Three properties explain the persistence: it measured practice rather than attitudes, it reported similar patterns across very different school systems, and it was published with the instruments attached — so later researchers could apply the same categories instead of inventing new ones. It also dates from before the large-scale device rollouts of the 2010s, which makes it a useful baseline when arguing about what one-to-one computing did and did not change.

Limits, and how to read it

Three limits matter when the report is used as evidence. Practice was described by observers applying a shared coding scheme, so the measures are only as good as the raters' calibration rather than objective properties of a lesson. The survey components report what participants said, not what they did. And the design describes association, not experimental effect: it shows which practices travelled together and under which school conditions, not what happens when a system adopts one of them on its own. Claims that the report “proved” technology improves learning misread it — its conclusion was closer to the opposite, that devices by themselves changed nothing about practice, and that the tasks students are given set the ceiling on what technology can contribute.

Companion presentation

A conference presentation, ITL Research 2011 — Findings and Future Directions, accompanied the report and restated the same conclusions with the study's charts. Public archives hold only redirects and HTML captures of that file path, so the presentation is documented here rather than served. A Spanish-language variant of the 2011 report also existed; it is outside the scope of this archive's source list.

Citation

Shear, L., Gallagher, L., Patel, D., & Fullan, M. (2011). Innovative Teaching and Learning Research: 2011 Findings and Implications. Microsoft Partners in Learning / SRI International.

Where to read it: the file is served on this site under its historical path, and the report also survives in public web archives; institutional copies circulate in education faculties. Search the exact title with the authors' surnames for other copies. If you hold an authoritative copy and a licence that permits redistribution under different terms, or you are a rights holder with a request, use the about page — see also the rights note above.