Spanish High School Students’ Interests in Technology

Abstract

The authors have examined the relative contribution of personal (emotional state, gender-role attitudes), contextual (perceived social supports and barriers), and cognitive (self-efficacy beliefs, outcome expectations) variables to technological interests in a sample ( N = 2,364) of 10th-grade Spanish students. The results of path analysis supported social cognitive career theory (SCCT), indicating that technological self-efficacy contributed to technological interests and technological outcome expectations. Perceived social support and perceived social barriers were related to technological self-efficacy, technological outcome expectations, and technological interests. However, the results did not support the hypothesis that outcome expectations contribute to interests. Contrary to expectations, there was no influence of gender-role attitudes on technological self-efficacy, but gender-role attitudes did determine technological interests. Finally, our study demonstrated that emotional state influenced technological self-efficacy beliefs, technological outcome expectations, and technological interests. This research extends previous work in this area by examining an understudied group, Spanish teenage students.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.