Slovak high school students' attitudes toward computers

Abstract

The pervasive involvement of information and communication technologies and computers in our daily lives influences changes of attitude toward computers. We focused on finding these ecological effects in the differences in computer attitudes as a function of gender and age. A questionnaire with 34 Likert-type items was used in our research. The sample consisted of 659 students from 14 high schools, aged 15–19 years attending the first, the second, the third, and the fourth years of study. The results of the questionnaire were divided into the two dimensions of concrete computer enjoyment and computer anxiety. On the first dimension both younger students and girls have positive attitudes. On the second dimension both younger students and boys have more positive attitudes. Overall, girls have more positive attitudes than boys. This is interesting because in the existing literature there is evidence that boys have more positive attitudes toward computers than girls. Perhaps a change is taking place.

Keywords:

• computer attitudes
• computer anxiety
• computer enjoyment
• questionnaire
• students

Acknowledgments

We thank Scott Lamphear and Dr. Joe Psotka, who kindly improved the English for this article. This study was supported by KEGA 3/6235/08 and LC06046.