Devices Alone Don’t Transform Teaching: Spanish Study Reveals What Really Drives Classroom Technology

A sweeping national study of Spanish schools has delivered a finding that could reshape how governments spend billions on educational technology: simply filling classrooms with laptops, tablets, and digital whiteboards does almost nothing, by itself, to change how teachers teach. The research, conducted across Spain by Eduardo Contreras-Cintado and María Napal-Fraile of the Public University of Navarre, combined a quantitative survey of 439 primary and secondary school teachers with in-depth interviews of 26 teachers and four educational technology coordinators responsible for training programs serving more than 115,000 public school teachers. Its central conclusion is strikingly clear: each educational stage behaves as a distinct ecosystem, and the factors that push teachers to actually use technology — and to use it in genuinely personalized ways — differ sharply between primary and secondary schools.

The study, published in the Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, employed a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design. In the quantitative phase, teachers from across Spain completed a 26-item questionnaire covering their professional profiles, school characteristics, available infrastructure, classroom technology use, perceptions of technology, and personalization practices. The researchers then fitted a structural equation model (SEM) to the data, using the lavaan package in R and following a rigorous three-step analytical approach: descriptive statistics and normality testing, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to establish construct validity, and multigroup invariance testing to determine whether the same statistical model could be applied to different groups. Model fit was excellent, with Tucker–Lewis and Comparative Fit Index values above 0.95 and error indices below 0.05.

That statistical rigor paid off when the multigroup analysis revealed something unexpected: while men and women could be validly compared within a single model, primary and secondary education could not. The constructs underlying technology use were simply not equivalent across the two stages. When the researchers fitted separate models for each stage, they found that in primary education, technology use was strongly determined by the availability of infrastructure in the school, with a standardized path coefficient of 0.600 — while teacher training and perception failed to reach statistical significance. In secondary education, by contrast, all three factors mattered: infrastructure, digital training, and teachers’ perceptions of what technology achieves all shaped classroom use. In other words, primary school teachers use technology mainly when it is put in front of them; secondary school teachers use it when it is available, when they know how to use it well, and when they believe it works.

The interviews illuminated why this divide exists. Primary teachers reported that the one-device-per-student model had been achieved in only a fraction of their schools, that equipment was often old and rarely renewed, and that internet connectivity was patchy. Their software use was limited to basic tasks — information searches, presentation programs, test creation tools. Sixty percent of the primary teachers interviewed expressed negative views of educational technology, 80 percent said it had not improved academic outcomes, and 70 percent reported that they did not actually personalize content, even though most believed they could. Secondary teachers, working with more demanding curricula and more autonomous students, showed the opposite pattern: better equipment, a wider variety of software including simulators and data analysis tools, and more tangible personalization practices, such as adapting materials for low-achieving students, gifted students, and students with cognitive or visual impairments.

Perception emerged as the study’s most powerful psychological variable. The researchers defined it as teachers’ expectations about whether technology improves student attention, engagement, motivation, and academic outcomes — or does nothing at all. Across both educational stages, perception drove the personalization of content, confirming the study’s hypothesis that what teachers believe about technology shapes whether they adapt materials to meet individual cognitive needs. This finding aligns with the UTAUT2 acceptance model, in which performance expectancy and social influence determine usage intention. Notably, however, perception did not directly drive teachers’ intention to pursue further digital training. Instead, training was linked to teacher profiles — age and years of experience — in both stages, with older and longer-serving teachers having accumulated more training opportunities over their careers.

The qualitative data exposed an uncomfortable truth about the training itself. Most teachers reported having completed fewer than ten formal digital courses and acquiring much of their competence through self-directed learning, which secondary teachers described as ‘incalculable’ in scope. More than half said training courses focused primarily on how to operate tools rather than on their didactic applications. The coordinators confirmed this, explaining that course evaluation was minimal: teachers submitted a classroom application project that was not rigorously graded, and certification amounted to a procedural pass or fail. One coordinator offered a memorable critique: teachers want ‘the flan recipe’ without caring what happens in the oven, and only those who understand what happens in the oven can create genuinely creative lessons. The system, she said, forces trainers to teach simple recipes.

The study also documented an emerging cultural headwind. Several primary teachers voiced resistance to digitalization, citing media coverage of technology’s negative effects on children and policy reversals abroad — such as Sweden’s reevaluation of digital efforts following disappointing PIRLS reading results. The researchers suggest these teachers may have been more influenced by news narratives than by actual institutional information, a mechanism consistent with research on how media shapes public opinion. In primary education, where concerns about child protection carry symbolic and emotional weight, this amplifying factor may reinforce conservative teaching practices and dampen both the willingness to integrate technology and the appetite for training.

There is also a structural peculiarity in the Spanish context: digital competence certification is often pursued not out of professional obligation but as a strategic asset, earning teachers points in public transfer competitions that determine where they can be posted. Two interviewed secondary teachers admitted they pursued ICT training primarily for exactly this reason. Combined with the finding that self-reported digital competence frequently exceeds assessed competence — a gap documented across multiple prior studies — this raises questions about whether certification systems are measuring anything meaningful at all. The authors argue for far more rigorous evaluation of training courses, including indicators of classroom transfer and observable improvement in teaching practice, along with systematic short-, medium-, and long-term follow-up of training impact.

The implications extend well beyond Spain. Governments across Europe and beyond have spent decades pursuing a supply-side strategy: provide the equipment, offer the courses, and assume integration will follow. This study shows why that assumption fails. In primary schools, infrastructure is the gatekeeper — but once passed, training and belief matter little, and usage remains shallow. In secondary schools, training and perception become decisive, but even there, half of the interviewed teachers did not believe personalized teaching was achievable with technology, citing class sizes and workload. If administrators want technology to move beyond replacing worksheets with screens, the authors conclude, they must act directly on teachers’ perceptions — demonstrating in concrete, everyday terms how these tools help solve real classroom problems — while redesigning training to be stage-specific, pedagogically deep, and genuinely evaluated. Each educational stage, the study insists, is its own ecosystem, and one-size-fits-all digitization strategies will keep producing islands of innovation rather than transformation.

The theoretical scaffolding of the study draws heavily on established technology-acceptance research. The UTAUT2 model, developed by Venkatesh and colleagues, holds that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions jointly determine whether a person adopts a technology. The Spanish findings map onto this framework in an instructive way: infrastructure operates as a facilitating condition, perception as performance expectancy, and training as a proxy for the self-efficacy that prior work by Hatlevik and others has identified as the starting point for overcoming everyday classroom obstacles. What the study adds is evidence that the relative weight of these predictors is not fixed but shifts across educational stages, a nuance that single-population acceptance studies have generally been unable to capture.

The distinction between instrumental and pedagogical technology use also connects to broader debates in the field. Frameworks such as TPACK have long argued that technical knowledge alone is insufficient, and that meaningful integration requires the intersection of technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge. The finding that most Spanish training courses emphasized tool operation over didactic application suggests that professional development has not yet internalized this principle, which may explain why self-reported digital competence, measured against the European DigCompEdu reference framework, consistently exceeds assessed competence in prior research.

The mixed-methods design itself deserves attention. Sequential explanatory designs of this kind allow qualitative interviews to probe the mechanisms behind statistically significant paths, and here the interviews revealed dynamics invisible to the questionnaire, such as the role of media narratives in shaping primary teachers’ skepticism and the strategic use of certification for posting competitions. This methodological layering strengthens the credibility of conclusions that might otherwise rest on correlational evidence alone.

Finally, the study’s regional sampling across two Spanish autonomous communities reflects the decentralized structure of Spanish education policy, where regional administrations design their own training offerings. This heterogeneity, while complicating generalization, mirrors conditions in other federal or quasi-federal systems such as Germany’s Länder, where neighboring research has documented similarly uneven integration trajectories. The authors’ call for stage-specific and perception-targeted strategies therefore carries weight for any jurisdiction pursuing supply-side digitization without accounting for the beliefs, profiles, and working conditions of the teachers expected to deliver it.

Subject of Research: Factors determining technology use, digital teacher training, and learning personalization in Spanish primary and secondary education

Article Title: Factors involving technology use, digital training, and teaching personalization: a national and regional mixed-methods study

Article References: Eduardo, C.-C., & María, N.-F. (2026). Factors involving technology use, digital training, and teaching personalization: a national and regional mixed-methods study. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 15(1), Article 20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-026-00067-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-026-00067-y

Keywords: educational technology, ICT integration, teacher training, digital competence, personalized learning, primary education, secondary education, structural equation modeling, UTAUT2, Spain, mixed methods, teacher perception