Abstract

The work presented here is a second report from a longrange project on studying students’ attitudes toward computers. The project started from our skepticism of the wide-spread belief that prospective teachers are less likely to embrace computer technology than other students. The first set of results was presented in Paprzycki and Vidakovic (1994). In that study, the differences between the attitudes toward computers of students of the University of Texas at the Permian Basin (UTPB) and the University of Hartford (UH) was studied. Our data at that time indicated that the choice of becoming a prospective teacher has a minimal correlation with the students’ attitudes toward computers. We have found that the primary factors were gender, age and the school attended. Since then three things have happened. First, Stanislaw Ubermanowicz (of Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland) joined our team; second, a series of modifications to the initial instrument was made; and third, we have collected additional data at St. Cloud State University (SCSU) and Adam Mickiewicz University (AMU) as well as increased the total amount of data collected at UTPB. The primary aim of this paper is to present the results of comparing the attitudes toward computer of Polish and American students (prospective teachers and other majors). In addition we made a number of comparisons similar to the earlier study studying the correlations between age, gender, the school attended, and attitudes toward computers.

Citation

Ubermanowicz, S. (1995). Comparing Attitudes Toward Computers of Polish and American Prospective Teachers. In J. Willis, B. Robin & D. Willis (Eds.), Proceedings of SITE 1995--Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (pp. 45-48). Waynesville, NC USA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). Retrieved August 12, 2022 from https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/46568/.