Developing an Internet Attitude Scale for high school students

Abstract

Although educators over the past decade have developed various scales measuring students' computer attitudes, few of them have constructed scales specifically for attitudes towards the Internet. The purpose of this study was to develop an Internet attitude scale for high school students. Through both revising a previous scale proposed by Selwyn (1997) [Selwyn, N. (1997. Students' attitudes toward computers: validation of a computer attitude scale for 16-19 education. Computers & Education, 28(1), 35-41] and writing new items, this study developed an Internet Attitude Scale of 18 items, with the following four subscales: perceived usefulness, affection, perceived control, and behavior. This study also explored gender differences on the scale, and the relationship between Internet experience and students' responses on the scale. Research data gathered from 753 Taiwan high school students revealed that students of different gender and various Internet experiences did not show statistical differences on the perceptions toward the potential usefulness of the Internet subscale. However, male students tended to express more positive feeling, lower anxiety, and higher confidence toward using the Internet than female students. Students having more Internet experience tended to show similar positive attitudes than those of less experience.

The Impact of Internet Experience and Attitude on Student Preference for Blended Learning

“…Consequently, a number of scales have been designed to examine student attitude to Internet use (see e.g. Duggan, Hess, Morgan, Kim, & Wilson, 1999, 2001Morse, Gullekson, Morris, & Popovich, 2011;Tsai et al, 2001;Zhang, 2007).…”

University Students’ Perceptions of and Attitudes Toward (Online) Peer Assessment

“…In a study of group PA (Johnson and Smith 1997), female university students received lower PA marks than male students, even though their marks from staff were higher than their male counterparts. In addition, females are usually perceived as less competent or confident in and less motivated toward the use of technology compared to males (Spotts et al 1997;Tsai et al 2001b) with few exceptions (Clegg et al 2000). Few studies have focused on investigating students' perceptions of online PA specifically, and there is a need to examine the gender difference in students' attitudes toward online PA.…”

Gender Differences in the Usage and Attitudes toward the Internet among Student Teachers in a Public Malaysian University

“…The instrument developed to measure the attitudes was adapted from Tsai, Lin and Tsai [19] and consisted of fifteen items. Each item was accompanied by a five point Likert-type scale ranging from strongly disagree (5) to strongly agree (1) The sub-scales that made up the attitude construct were perceived usefulness, emotional response and perceived control.…”

“…Each item was accompanied by a five point Likert-type scale ranging from strongly disagree (5) to strongly agree (1) The sub-scales that made up the attitude construct were perceived usefulness, emotional response and perceived control. In this study, perceived usefulness was defined as student teachers' perception of the positive impacts of the Internet on society and the individual, emotional response was defined as the student teachers' feelings and anxiety when using the Internet and perceived control was defined as student teachers' confidence of the independent control of the Internet [19] . The justification for measuring these three sub-scales for attitudes was also based on Liaw's [20] view that user attitudes toward computer and Internet technologies can be divided into three primary measurements: affective, cognitive and behavioral measurements.…”