Date of Award

1-3-2003

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

First Advisor

Richard G Landry

Abstract

The purposes of this study were twofold: (1) to determine anxiety levels of undergraduate education majors and to investigate the relationship between various demographic and computer experience variables for undergraduate education students at the university, and well-established measures of computer anxiety/phobia, and (2) to examine the nature of computer anxiety as it was experienced by selected members of the teacher education faculty at the same university. The first purpose was addressed with a quantitative study and the second purpose was addressed with a qualitative study. The quantitative study examined the effects of computer proficiency, computer experiences, and the demographics of computer access, gender, age, class (year in school), and high school class size, on computer anxiety, computer attitudes, and computer perceptions among 384 undergraduate education students. Factorial analysis, descriptive statistics and multivariate regression analysis were applied to the data. The qualitative study examined education faculty computer experiences and viewpoints in a collective case study. Five faculty participants were individually engaged in a series of five partially structured interviews. Quantitative results indicated that computer anxiety was influencing the computing comfort of a substantial number of students. Computer anxiety could be predicted in a number of ways, including by computer user proficiency and the number and nature of problems experienced by a student while using a computer. Convenient access to a computer and the attitude of the person who introduced the student to computers were also found to be somewhat useful in predicting computer anxiety. Qualitative results indicated that time constraints, support availability, and equipment performance adversely influenced computer utilization and comfort, and, to some extent, inhibited computer advocacy and future vision of educational computing. Overall computer system quality appears to have been an overlooked issue. These studies revealed a need for the university to review student computer training resources, faculty workloads, and university research commitment to educational computing. The studies also point to a broad need for improvements in the quality of computer hardware, software, and operating systems.

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