Exploring the role of high school students’ internet use on their internet self-efficacy: a structural equation model

ABSTRACT

During the normalization of COVID-19 control measures, more and more high school students are learning through the Internet. With the widespread use of online teaching, students’ internet self-efficacy has become an important factor in measuring students’ online learning ability. Although researchers have been paying greater attention to the relationship between duration of internet use, internet use experience, attitudes towards the internet and internet self-efficacy, the existing literature lacks in-depth analysis of the structural relationships of these variables among high school students in the normalization stage of epidemic prevention and control. Therefore, this study aimed to establish an integrated model to describe the structural relationship between senior high school students’ duration of internet use, internet use experience, attitudes towards the internet and internet self-efficacy. A total of 640 Chinese high school students participated in this study. Through structural equation modelling, the results confirm that internet use experience is related to attitudes towards the internet and attitudes towards the internet are related to Internet self-efficacy. At the same time, it is confirmed that attitudes towards the internet-mediated the relationships between internet use experience and internet self-efficacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Internet self-efficacy
• attitudes towards the internet
• internet use experience
• duration of internet use
• high school student
• COVID-19

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hua-yang Zhang

Hua-Yang Zhang is a lecturer at the School of Communication at Shenzhen Polytechnic University. His research interests include educational technology, ICT learning, and multimodal learning analytics.

Yi-xin Wang

Yi-Xin Wang is a lecturer at the Institute of Higher Education at Northwestern Polytech University. His research interests include ICT learning and higher education.

Wei Liu

Wei Liu is a lecturer at the School of Psychology at Guizhou Normal University. His research interests include the application of quantitative research methods and teacher education.