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The Collegiate Tech Effect

9/13/2007

By Terry Calhoun

I wrote recently about the annual Beloit College Mindset List, which began as a purely internal way to let Beloit College staff know a little about how the perspectives and experiences of each year's incoming freshman class might differ from the faculty's. Some of the items in that list related to IT, but most did not, and included items like "they've never rolled down a car window."

What if you could access a really detailed study of students that focused directly on their use of and attitudes toward information technology? What if part of the study was a survey of nearly 28,000 students from more than 100 institutions, and the results were sliced and diced not only by gender but by institutional Carnegie class? Sounds pretty useful and interesting, eh?

Well, my employer, the Society for College and University Planning, pays attention to such stuff, and I am pleased to let you know that ECAR has just published such a study. It is titled The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2007. As a bonus, it is the fourth report in a longitudinal series, so it includes comparisons over time going back to 2004.

This 2007 ECAR research study is a longitudinal extension of the 2004, 2005, and 2006 ECAR studies of students and information technology. The study, which reports noticeable changes from previous years, is based on quantitative data from a spring 2007 survey and interviews with 27,846 freshman, senior, and community college students at 103 higher education institutions. It focuses on what kinds of information technologies these students use, own, and experience; their technology behaviors, preferences, and skills; how IT impacts their experiences in their courses; and their perceptions of the role of IT in the academic experience.

"Oh," you say, "my institution doesn't belong to ECAR, and I can't afford to pay the fee to purchase a single report, no matter how potentially interesting." More bonus: "Because of the critical importance of this topic, ECAR is delighted to make this report available online to everyone now."

I recommend downloading and reading quickly through the "Key Findings" summary. If you really want to dig into it, the entire report (124 pages) is also online, as are the "Roadmap" (which is sort of a more popularly written, even shorter summary) and the "Survey Instrument."

I bet if you thought about it for a moment you could answer these two questions without reading the results (answers at the end):

Q1: What kind of handheld electronic information device are students using less in 2007 than they were in 2004?