Teachers' perceptions about the usefulness of integrating a digital device into high school mathematics classrooms

This paper summarizes finding about teachers’ perceptions about the usefulness of integrating graphing calculators from an exploratory qualitative study with a huge amount of qualitative data collected from 13 mathematics teachers who taught the Regents level and other advance-level courses. The participant teachers were from three high schools in three suburban school districts in a medium-sized city in Central New York. This study gave an opportunity to teachers to address their thoughts, practices, and perceptions on the use of graphing calculators. Teachers indicated many problems and disadvantages of using graphing calculators in mathematics classrooms besides advantages. Both the advantages and disadvantages should be taken into account by educators and policy makers in education. Findings suggest that future regulations on the state curriculum, standardized test exams, and mathematics education standards should be revised according to teachers’ perceptions about advantages and disadvantages of using calculators in order to understand how to make effective use of those technologies in the classrooms.