Adolescents Use of the World-Wide Web in Ten Public Schools

Public school students attitudes and opinions toward the World-Wide Web were analyzed to discover if and how they affect students use of this new educational medium in a school setting. An exploratory principle components analysis of forty use statements resulted in an eight-factor solution. Cross-tabular analyses revealed significant differences in the way that students describe their use of the WWW. Gender, grade level, and amount of time spent using the WWW were used to create between-group comparisons in the seven WWW use categories that made up the computer-administered survey instrument. The final phase of data analysis was a content analysis of sites visited by students. The commercial sites received the lowest rating for "suitability for academic research" of all the domain names. And while students reported their purpose for using the WWW as "research and learning" fifty-two percent of the time, the coders found only twenty-seven percent of the sampled sites to be "suitable" for that purpose.