Coping with Change: Evaluating Teachers’ Concerns Regarding Post-Pandemic Technology Adoption

Adopting digital technology, as part of broader educational changes, often presents challenges for teachers, researchers, and educators. The period of remote teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic created a unique opportunity to examine teachers' concerns regarding technology integration in real time and to better understand the factors influencing its adoption and deployment. Employing a mixed methods approach, this study applied the Stages of Concern (SoC) Questionnaire to high-school chemistry teachers ( N = 101). The findings indicated that the intensive use of digital technology gave rise to various types of concerns, some of which were not explicitly captured by the original Concerns-Based Adoption Model. These concerns included issues such as digital privacy, troubleshooting, student distraction, and the compatibility of applications across personal devices. Although initially considered to represent a new Technological SoCs, subsequent analyses yielded inconclusive evidence regarding its conceptual status. Confirmatory factor analysis supported a two-factor model distinguishing Technological from Management concerns; however, the two factors were substantially correlated, and qualitative item-level analysis indicated considerable conceptual overlap between them. Therefore, the findings do not provide sufficient evidence to determine whether Technological concerns constitute an independent stage within the SoC framework, and further research is needed to examine this possibility. Differences in teachers' concerns regarding technology integration across age, teaching experience, gender, and social affiliation are discussed.