1. Introduction

In numerous countries around the world, there currently is a major shift in school education from what teachers do to an outcomes-focus on what students achieve and an emphasis on catering for student individual differences in backgrounds, interests and learning styles. Although an effective outcomes-focused system can be extremely difficult to achieve for practical reasons, integration of information communications technology (ICT) into the learning environment has considerable potential for providing teachers with the means to manage efficiently the diverse educational provisions needed to optimise each individual student s outcomes. In many schools, ICT is becoming more commonplace and, in some cases, the integration of ICT into the learning environment is becoming a major thrust. In the field of learning environments, therefore, there is a need for an instrument that can be used to monitor the development and effectiveness of the learning environments that teachers create which provide an outcomes-focus and which integrate the use of ICT into their teaching and learning.

This chapter reports the reliability and validity of a generally-applicable instrument, designed to monitor the evolution of technology-rich, outcomes-focused learning environments, as well as its use in two research applications: 1) how the learning environment created by teachers influences students achievement, attitudes and self-efficacy and 2) whether an innovative new school is effective in terms of the classroom learning environments that it creates.