Relationship between ICT supporting conditions and ICT application in Chinese urban and rural basic education

To investigate the relationships between schools’ ICT supporting conditions and ICT application, a total of 2567 primary and secondary schools from 47 prefecture-level cities were surveyed. The questionnaire was administered to collect the ICT supporting conditions in school (ISCS) and the ICT application in school (IAIS) for each school. Among the ISCS factors, the ICT Environment and School Scale were indicated as being significant predictors of IAIS. In addition, the significant predictive relationship between the ISCS and the IAIS factors for rural schools was much stronger than for urban schools. This indicates that the rural and urban schools in China are now at different ICT development stages. Furthermore, rural schools should focus on the improvement of physical ICT infrastructure and the quality digital resources, whereas urban schools should try to improve teachers’ inadequate epistemic beliefs and design thinking ability. Nevertheless, there are other external and individual-level factors that could directly and indirectly influence schools’ ICT application in education.