Anxiety with and Without New Technology Among Romanian High School Students

Abstract

Nowadays, the new technology defines the classroom and students’ and teachers’ life. Sometimes the attitude towards technology use is marked by negative dysfunctional emotion, anxiety, fear, avoidance or dependence. This paper focuses both on the anxiety with the new technology and on the anxiety without technology. Our research aims to examine the attitudes and behaviours of Romanian high school students regarding trendy technologies, such as computers, internet and smartphones, including the access to social networking applications. The following tools were used: CARS (Heinssen, Glass, - Knight, 1987), IAS (Nickel and Pinto, 1986), four scales from MTUAS (Rosen, Whaling, Carrier, Cheever, and Rokkum, 2013), the Use of Smartphones for Learning Purposes Scale-USLS and a socio-demographic questionnaire. There were 517 participants distributed in two studies. The findings showed some differences concerning gender, age, specialization and academic performance, as well as an evolution of participants from the anxiety towards the computer (highest with females) to the anxiety without technology (similar for females and males). School performance is negatively associated with computer anxiety and Facebook activities. The study is important in the Romanian context, where computers, internet and smartphone penetration is more pronounced with younger people. Pedagogical issues of the research are also discussed, anxiety having a double function, as an endogenous and exogenous factor with respect to one’s academic and professional development.