Masters Thesis!

The Thesis
One of the concepts that is often missed when looking at incorporation of technology into education deals with how to measure its impact.  Students might say "I like it," but that might not mean anything with respect to actual usage.  One of the main ways that technology acceptance is measured is by using something like the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) postulated by Davis (1989).  From the research I have done, this (or one of it's newer iterations) is one of the most popular measuring tools used in researching technology acceptance.  However, it has historically been used with adults or, at the very least, college and university students.

So what did I do?  I made a version of it (changing only wording) that could be used at the high school level.  My findings were very interesting, and I will share a quick overview of it here. The original TAMs found that there were at least four different factors that influence technology usage: perceived usefulness (this is the most important), perceived ease of use, social influence, and facilitating conditions.  In essence, then, if someone thinks that a technology is useful, will be easy to use, feel that other people think it will be a good idea, and feel that there will be support, then people will tend to want to use the technology in question.  Makes sense.

In my study, I used the same instrument, but there were two differences.  1) the technology I used was a WIKI page, something that I knew no student had every created; 2) WIKI pages allowed me to look at actual usage, not simply a questionnaire that dealt with a users intent to use. My findings were as follows: 1) I found that, with high school level students, the only factor that significantly influenced their actual WIKI usage was perceived ease of use; 2) boys felt more comfortable with the technology in question but 3) girls used the WIKI way more than boys (so gender played a role). 

This finding suggests that the ease of use is the most important factor, something I feel is a change in attitude towards technology acceptance - technology must be easy now (IPOD or Facebook-like) and more intuitive perhaps. How does this play out in education? That will be the discussion of my next blog posting!  Stay tuned!