Student attitudes towards Web sites

Abstract

Abstract This study addresses two questions related to the evaluative criteria used by students to make judgments about the use of Web pages. Using a survey design with college students the data shows that students tend to use Web sites that are clear to understand and do not contain too many bells and whistles, and are relevant to their special interests and needs. Use of the Web There is little doubt that the use of the Web in pedagogy is becoming as ubiquitous as other teaching tools such as books and whiteboards. Consequently, the issues surrounding attitude towards the Web and the use of the Web has been addressed in recent scholarship and research about the Web. For instance, one area of enquiry involved the role of the Web in conducting research for class projects to explore how college students conduct research on the Web and made evaluations on the quality and type of research being conducted (Burton and Chadwick, 2000; Lindsay and McLaren, 2000; Scime, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c). Similarly, Pascoe, Applebee, and Clayton (1996) confirmed that ease, convenience, and accessibility continue to be major factors influencing academic Internet use. Another emphasis has been on the way in which students are able to evaluate the quality of the research they conduct by using the Web. Studies have shown that students use such criteria as the appearance of the .edu and .gov Top-Level Domains to establish the trustworthiness of a web resource (O'Hanlon, 2002; Thompson, 2003). Such situations suggests that students need more training on Internet research in general, with emphasis on critical evaluation of all electronic sources and proper citation of the sources they do use. This is particularly important since it can be argued that the use of the Web for research and the way in which quality of information is judged is implicated by the way in which research on the Web is initiated (D'Esposito and Gardner, 1999; Lubans, 1998; Scime and Kerschberg, 2000, 2003). The use of the Web for research also underscores the increasing affinity for digital information such as e-books as opposed to the traditional analog information available from books in a library (Blumenstyk, 2001; Young, 2001). The University of Texas at Austin, in their significant usage of e-books, has found an important library niche for e-books irrelevant of whether students have an equal experience with them and print books alike: they can't be stolen. They found that e-books filled significant gaps in their collection caused by theft (Dillon, 2001). Other research teams began to explore what college students were doing on the Web beyond academics. Goodson (2001) reported that almost all students used the Web to communicate with friends and family via e-mail. In some institutions where Internet access is relatively reliable and seamless, 'non-academic purposes' represents one of the key Internet usage categories. (Anderson, 2001; Jones, 2002; Mitra & Hazen, 1999). College students have even been found to engage in excessive Internet use. According to Kandell (1998), several aspects of college life can create a 'dependence' on the Internet. Dependence, coupled with easy access to technology, points toward college students spending a substantial quantity of time on the Internet. Considering the significant amount of Web use reported, the information that students encounter on the Web is an important topic to investigate. The issue here is not the validity of Internet information, which is important when doing research, nor is it a question of the legality of information as has been the case with the debates surrounding offensive information available on-line. What students encounter has more to do with information presentation and message design issues regarding the Web. With the burgeoning use of the Web and its messages, we argue that it is useful to consider how much attention has been paid to the way in which the information is presented. …

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