Computer-related attitudes and actions of teacher candidates

This study investigated the computer-related attitudes of 56 preservice teachers who were in a program training to teach either secondary school or primary school. It also examined outcomes from a challenging computer task. Primarily we were looking for gender and program effects, but were also interested in the relationship between self-reported beliefs and actual outcomes. No gender differences were found for any of the computer attitudes or for outcomes from the computer task. Regarding program effects, participants training to teach at the secondary level had higher computer self-efficacy, and were less likely to predict that they would give up or avoid a challenging computer task than were elementary teacher-candidates. However, they were not more successful on the computer task. Finally, computer attitudes were correlated with task-outcomes and the relationship was strongest when the attitude measures were closely tied to the task. These findings are discussed from the perspective of how they might impact on children's learning.

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