Factors Affecting Students' Acceptance of Tablet PCs: A Study in Italian High Schools

To maximize the advantages of the tablet personal computer (TPC) at school, this technology needs to be accepted by students as new tool for learning. With reference to the Technology Acceptance Model and the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology, the aims of this study were (a) to analyze factors influencing high school students' acceptance of TPCs and (b) to detect any difference in this influence considering the frequency of TPC use, students' gender, and school grade. Two hundred and ninety-six students from six high schools in the Milan area participated in the study. Data were collected using an online survey. The results showed that empowerment in learning, perceived usefulness, and support conditions affect learning use, and empowerment in learning and affect influence communicative use of TPCs. The implications of these results are discussed.

"our model showed that the learning use of TPCs is affected by empowerment in learning, perceived usefulness, and support conditions. This firstly means that students regard TPCs as technological instruments that can help and promote learning processes, as well as support them in their studies and homework. [...] The communicative use of TPCs is affected by empowerment in learning and by the additional factor that we introduced, namely, affect toward TPCs. Students who find TPCs to be a pleasing and fun tool for learning, while at the same time perceiving the related learning advantage, are more prone to use them in order to communicate with both teachers and schoolmates on school-related topics. [...] Perceived ease of use played no significant role in our model in terms of predicting learning or communicative use. [...] Our second question of inquiry regarded whether the causal model was invariant for, respectively, the personal frequency of TPC use by the students, students’ gender, and school grade. Our model turned out to be invariant for all three of these variables. [...] In summary, the present study offers a contribution to a research area that is still relatively unexplored, namely, the acceptance of TPCs by students in high school. Its findings suggest the need to analyze students’ acceptance toward TPCs in terms of their uses for learning and communicative activities, as well as to identify the factors affecting each of these uses." (Cacciamani et al., 2018, pp. 128-129).