Investigating Turkey High School Graduates' Attitudes towards Technology

Computers have been integrated into almost all areas of our daily lives. Serious problems stem from the fact that elementary and secondary school students in general have taken none or inadequate computer classes and as such, their awareness of efficient computer usage has not been adequately addressed. During university education, students have been observed experiencing hardships using computers for research and document preparation, due to their prior use of computers having consisted mostly of accessing social media and games. The current study investigated 2013-2014 high school graduates' attitudes regarding technology, the computer programs they used and their usage frequency, reasons for why they use the Internet and social media and their usage frequencies, and their basic computer skills at university level. The participants of the current study were students who had just entered various departments and language preparation levels at Fatih University, Istanbul, Turkey. 250 Participants were randomly selected. Data for the current study were collected through a Basic Computer Skills Questionnaire, an application for determining the levels of participants' basic computer skills. Significant benefits are foreseen for students entering universities as helpful computer users with awareness attained during elementary or secondary education. Additionally, particularly for students who prefer non-social majors, it will be very useful to have learned a programming language and an algorithm at basic levels. The Internet as a medium for potentially leading to a diverse range of problems today requires conscious users. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.