Browse Theses

The purpose of this study was to investigate Thai college students' attitudes toward computers at the beginning and the end of a computer literacy course. Specific attention was given to the relationship between attitudes and gender, major, and prior computer experience.

The instrument used in this study, the Computer Attitudes Scale (Loyd and Gressard, 1984), consisted of 40 items organized into four Subscales (anxiety, confidence, liking, and usefulness). The subjects were 120 college students randomly selected from Eastern University, Cholburi, Thailand during the summer session of 1990. The subjects were assigned to an either experimental group or a control group; each group contained 28 science majors and 32 non-science majors.

The experimental group received instruction in a computer literacy course for 10 consecutive weeks. The control group did not attend the course. Attitudinal data were collected for both groups at the beginning and end of the course. The data were analyzed using dependent and independent t-tests to determine statistically significant differences in students' attitudes toward computers.

For a better understanding of effects of the extraneous variables (gender, major, and prior computer experience), a Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) and a Univariate Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) were applied to determine whether there were statistically significant differences on the four Computer Attitudes subscales.

The results of data analysis revealed the following: (1) A positive change in attitudes toward computers was found in the experimental group on three of the four Subscales. (2) A positive change in attitudes toward computers was found in the control group on all the four Subscales. (3) The computer literacy course did not appear to have a differential effects on students' attitudes toward computers. (4) Gender and major did not appear to be related to changes in students' attitudes toward computers. (5) Prior computer experience did appear to be related to changes in students' attitudes. Students with high school computer class experience were more likely to express more positive attitudes towards computers.