Gender difference trends in computer literacy of first-year students

Abstract

We administered a computer literacy survey of our incoming, first-year students for the past three years. Our purpose was not to measure application skill levels, but to understand students' perception of their own skills, to identify from whom they learned how to perform a set of technology tasks, and to understand how access to different Internet connection types affects perception and the sources of student technology learning. Over the years, fale, first-year students have increased to parity in self-reported skill levels over the set of technology tasks, and report significantly higher skill levels on communications-oriented tasks. Males report significantly higher skill levels on technology-oriented tasks. Our results suggest that adoption of DSL Internet connections by fales is contributing to the improvent.