Attitudes concerning information technology

Abstract

In contemporary society Information Technology has become a vital tool in many areas of human endeavor. In the educational context, information society must give support to learning techniques, to continuous education and distance education, based on the Internet and network technologies, through school incentives, qualification of teachers, self-teaching, and large scale certification in Information Technology, as well as the implementation of curricula that include the use of Information Technology in pedagogical activities at all levels of formal education. This study had as its objective to evaluate the attitudes of students at the Universidade Federal do Ceará in relation to their use and operation of Information Technology. A scale of attitudes related to Information Technology, made up of twenty items, was applied to 470 students from various Universidade Federal do Ceará courses, during the second semester of the year 2002. The metric analysis of the scale indicated that such scale presented in the sample a high degree of precision, acceptable standard-error, high sensibility and validity of the construct. The results show that there exists a favorable attitude regarding Information Technology. No significant differences were observed in relation to the attitude variables, as far as they concern sex, age, area of study or semester. The interactions (sex X area of the course), (sex X age X area of the course), (sex X age X semester) and (age X area of the course X semester) presented significant differences. The conclusion is that, the little rejection of Information Technology observed in the study results, is a reflection of the very use and constant increase of computational resources in pedagogical and didactical activities at the Universidade Federal do Ceará.