Abstract:

A primary objective of education policies in Europe is to modernize and qualify schools and education systems, ensuring that they can provide greater efficiency and equity. The computer and technological resources are critical for this modernization, ensuring their up to date existence, certainly contributes to make schools more equitable in terms of the social and educational opportunities that are offered to students.

The proposed analysis establishes relationships between the recognition of equipment levels of schools with Information and Communications Technology (ICT), and the educational offers where these resources are used more often in classes, particularly by the teacher as an educational tool, providing models of these instruments and their relationship with some performance indicators of education systems in Europe (based on indicators of Eurydice and research center Empirica). In addition, it seeks to identify the type of barriers that limit the availability and the use of ICT in schools, particularly in classrooms or other areas specific to teaching.
This characterization is related to two-dimensional analysis. One is related to the performance of European education systems and their students, as the rates of certification of youth age groups, dropout rates, retention rates, skills assessments, etc. (sources for this type of data are statistical indicators produced by Eurydice; OECD, namely the PISA; Eurostat; or produced by international/European collaborative studies, TIMMS and PIRLS, for instance). Another dimension is to frame the education systems in their social contexts, featuring their populations from the point of view of education levels, professional and occupational insertions (particularly with reference to the categories that correspond to higher levels of qualification), and knowing the availability and uses of ICT (such as the available technologies in households) (see Eurostat and OECD sources).

One also aims to call up some of the theoretical and analytical contributions to enhance not only the joint reading of the dimensions described above but also the articulation between them. There's yet two approaches that are taken into account by such analytical possibilities: a dynamic joint clearance of some of these indicators, and a synchronous reading to try to identify configurations between these indicators and their relations through a multivariate analysis.

Keywords:

Education systems, ICT skills, European countries, multivariate analysis.