Understanding students’ adoption of a web-enhanced inquiry learning common for science literacy: An affordance-based PLS-SEM analysis

Persistent inequities in access to high-quality science instruction continue to limit students' learning opportunities in rural and underserved communities worldwide. Digital inquiry-based learning environments offer a promising pathway for addressing such disparities. However, limited research has examined how learners in marginalized contexts perceive and adopt these systems, particularly regarding the role of design affordances, technology acceptance processes, and their influence on learning outcomes. This study investigates the factors shaping middle school students' acceptance and use of a Web-enhanced Inquiry Learning Common for Science Literacy (WILC-SL), a platform particularly designed to support guided science inquiry in rural Thai schools. Drawing on technological, pedagogical, and content affordances and extending the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), we employed Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) to analyze survey data from 170 seventh-grade students. The PLS-SEM results indicate that technological affordance strongly predicts perceived ease of use. In contrast, content and pedagogical affordances do not significantly influence students' perceived usefulness or usability of the WILC-SL system. Although these affordances had limited power to predict outcomes, students’ attitudes toward the system became a key factor influencing their behavioral intention, which then significantly improved their science literacy outcomes. These findings highlight a motivational pathway, rather than a purely functional one, through which inquiry-oriented digital platforms can support equitable science learning in resource-constrained settings. The study contributes to research on digital learning adoption by demonstrating how usability, affective engagement, and contextualized design intersect to influence learning performance in rural environments. Implications for designing inclusive systems, such as an extended TAM and inquiry-rich digital learning systems, are discussed.