Teacher Education Students and Computers

The purpose of this study was to identify patterns of computer experience and attitudes of teacher education students. During a mandatory computer awareness course, the students provided information on their major, gender, and prior computer use. They also responded to a 20-item computer anxiety instrument. This information was collected from 914 teacher education undergraduates over a four-year period. Some of the findings include that over the course of four years, an increasing number of students entered the mandatory course with more experience—during Year 1 more than 50% had no prior computer experience whereas during Year 4 only 33% had no prior experience. Although programming experience remained relatively high throughout the four years, there was a trend of a decrease in computer use—from 33.5% in Year 1 to 28.2% in Year 4. The major areas of increase were CAI (from 6% in Year 1 to 21.6% in Year 4) and CMI, or applications software (from 10.2% in Year 1 to 17.4% in Year 4). A significant difference in computer anxiety was found when comparing different prior computer experiences. One finding was that, although more males than females had no prior experience with computers, males were less anxious toward computers than were females. This finding may be due to males’ having more programming experience than females; programming resulted in the lowest degree of computer anxiety. Findings are discussed in the context of their implications on computer training for students of different majors.