Individual differences in nurse and teacher training students' attitudes toward and use of information technology

Students in both nurse and teacher training are now expected to learn to make effective use of IT for their profession. However, they enter training with a variety of experience in IT which will affect how they respond to further IT skills training. In this survey, 154 nursing and 128 teacher training students reported on the uses they had made of computers and their attitudes towards them. Also, as a sense of being in control of the computer is important for becoming involved in its use, they completed a questionnaire to locate their locus of internal control. The teacher training students were more likely than the nursing students to have access to a home computer, to use computers more often and to have used a greater variety of software. However, this may be a gender effect as a greater proportion of the teacher trainees were male. For both teacher training and nursing students, having a more internal locus of control was correlated with more positive attitudes towards computers. This finding is important for those introducing students to the use of IT in their professions, so that appropriate software and teaching styles involving less open-ended tasks may be provided for the less internally controlled individuals. Interestingly, a much stronger relationship between being more internally controlled and being less scared of using a computer was found for teacher trainees than for nurse trainees. Thus for nurse trainees it is more likely that there are other individual factors predisposing them to fear using computers.