Development And Application Of A Cse Scale For Undergraduate Students

At present, researches on computer study psychological factors have been increasing, of which computer self-efficacy (CSE) is often mentioned. Qualitative and quantitative researches on CSE have emerged in endlessly. The most important thing in quantitative researches on CSE is the measurement, so development of measure instument has drawn high attention of researchers. But there hasn't been any research on development of CSE scales in China.CSE Scales that have been used in researches in China are all developed by foreign researchers. With the development of computer science and information technology, the connotations of CSE have been enriched and the limitations of these scales have been more and more distinct. Which is of the highest importance is that these scales may not fit computer learners in China because they were developed by foreign researchers. Therefore,developing local CSE scales and providing effective measure instrument for local researches on CSE is worth.What's more, the purpose of developing CSE scales is to apply the scales to find out problems and to afford ways to solve them. To the undergraduate students in our country, CSE is cultivated mainly by the curricula about computer in university. Such researches as applying effective CSE scales as measure instrument to a special curriculum and exploring the relationship between psychological factors and learners' traits in the course of studying the curriculum, then controlling these factors according to learners' traits in teaching and amending the negative teaching methods which have bad effect on CSE to imprve the teaching effect are meaningful. At the same time, the value of developing CSE scales is realized.In the background as mentioned above, this study develops a CSE scale for undergraduate students with Structural Equation Model (SEM) initially. After some modifications, the scale obtains a Cronbach'sαwhich is 0.8055, factor loadings of all indices in the measure model are greater than 2,χ2/df of the measure model is 2.066, RMSEA is 0.069, CFI is 0.93 and NNFI is 0.92. The cross-validation of the scale is very high. Then the scale is applied to the Fundamentals of Computer Culture Curriculum, and differences between students'CSE magnitude, strength and generalizability in the course of studying the Fundamentals of Computer Culture Curriculum are investigated with the scale, the result of independent-sample t test showes that males have higher magnitude and generalizability than females, and science students have higher magnitude and generalizability than arts students at the significant level of 0.05. After that, learners' test results in the final test and their behavior in classroom are investigated by interviews with the teachers.Based on appraising methods and instructional methods, the negative teaching methods which have bad effect on CSE are found out and strategies of improving CSE according to the traits of learners in the Fundamentals of Computer Culture Curriculum are proposed. University teachers modify these strategies and empirical study are carried to test them and thus to improve the teaching effect and to be used for reference in other curricula. Approved strategies are summarized at last.This paper has six chapters. Chapter 1 is introduction which introduces study background, then main concepts of the study are defined and theory foundation are expatiated on, object of this study is given at the end of the chapter. Chapter 2 introduces sudy methods and instruments. A literature review is given in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 are the most important parts of this paper, which depict development and application of the CSE scale. Chapter 6 summarizes results and shortages of the study and gives some expectation of relative studies in the future.