Abstract—Information and communication technology (ICT)
has never been more important in schools than in the current
context of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19
pandemic has forced many more teachers to use ICT for
teaching, even in less resourced countries such as Lesotho. In
this quantitative study, teachers’ ICT practices in Lesotho
during the year 2020 were examined through the lens of
technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK). The
objectives were to investigate the ICT tools that teachers
commonly use, describe the practices that characterize the
patterns of use, and determine the correlation between
teachers’ practices and their use of ICTs for teaching.
Altogether, 107 respondents, selected by a systematic
probability sampling technique, completed a five-point Likert
scale questionnaire comprising closed-ended items that
explored their practices on ICT use for teaching the subject of
biology. Data were analyzed for frequencies, means, and
standard deviations using the Statistical Package for Social
Sciences (SPSS) program. The results indicated that biology
teachers in Lesotho use ICTs rather sporadically in their
teaching and are consequently ill-prepared to adapt to and
mitigate the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on
schooling in Lesotho. The study concluded that teachers’ ICT
practices are inclined towards supporting more traditional and
teacher-centered approaches that rely on face-to-face teaching
and learning, with most schools thus remaining closed during
the pandemic. The study makes recommendations about the
possible ways in which biology teachers in particular could be
better prepared to specifically use ICT to teach biology either
online or as part of a face-to-face classroom.
Index Terms—COVID-19, high school biology, information
and communication technology, Lesotho, TPACK.
Bobojane Makuru and Thuthukile Jita are with the University of the Free
State, South Africa (e-mail: jitat@ufs.ac.za).
Cite: Bobojane Makuru and Thuthukile Jita, "Information and Communication Technology Practices in Biology Teaching in Lesotho High Schools," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 12, no. 7, pp. 668-677, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).