Effects of Introductory Computing Courses upon Computer Attitude, Computer Anxiety and Computer Literacy.

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Many colleges and junior colleges have various kinds of introductory courses teaching of programming, informatics, computing, information processing skill or system of computer use in education. These courses have their own primary instructional objectives, e.g., mastering FOTRAN programming skill and/or enriching students' exprience with many application software use. But, many professionals know these skills and experiences had often become out-of-date rapidly.Therefore, many teachers believe that the secondary objectives should be stressed which design the instruction to change students' attitude toward computer positively, to reduce computer anxiety, and to stimulate shaping the set to learn new knowledge and technology of computer sciences out of school through daily life. In short, the secondary objectives are to get learners computer literacy.The purpose of this study is to analyze the effects of introductory informatics courses on students' computer attitudes, computer anxiety, … More computer awareness and technical knowledge of conputer. The experimental design is simple, we tested students' (freshmen) computer literacy twice, before and after the course by the test we made. In 1992, we standardized our computer literacy test, measuring computer attitudes, computer anxiety, computer awareness, and technical knowledge. In some case, we could get the control group, but in other cases, we got only the treatment group. And we could longitudinally follow the change of a group of junior college students for two years who did not enroll the courses on informatics.Many freshmen are tested, they belong to the faculty of education, economics, and junior colleges. Main findings are, (1) Affective factors, i.e., computer attitudes and computer anxiety are scarcely affected by introductory informatics instruction, (2) Cognitive factors, i.e., computer awareness and technical knowledge on informatics, are greatly increased after the instruction in almost all cases. Also, two years longitudinal study on the junior college students who did not enroll the informatics course, showed same tendencies. This is to say that affective factors on computer are difficult to change, but we can easely stimulate learning latently knowledge on cognitive domain. Less