Abstract
An impressive amount of software was designed and marketed as educational software for primary and secondary school students. Today, there exists educational software designed specifically for a subject matter or for a more general educational purpose, aimed at enhancing a more diverse set of skills, required for multiple academic disciplines. Its primary end-purpose is to provide additional support for learning and to elicit higher academic performance from its users. Also, with respect to the originators of educational software utilization, it may be provided by the schools themselves or the learners, independently of the school. However, there is still scares empirical evidence as to the efficiency of educational software usage in relation with academic performance in Romanian students.
Against this current state of knowledge, we hypothesized that the higher the intensity of educational software utilization, the higher is the academic performance. Also, we considered alongside the intensity of utilization, the environment of utilization, the specificity of software, as well as the overall self-reported computer literacy of the learner. The design of the study was transversal, one-time correlational study, using multiple regressions to determine the most relevant impacts of the variables and structural equation modeling to develop a conceptual model of influence on the students’ academic performance. The data was collected from a sample of participants comprised of secondary education students—gymnasium and high school students. The independent and dependent variables were measured using self-reported measures of software utilization from the students and from their teachers, and factual data—i.e., academic grades—for the academic performance.
A feasible model of influence pathways was developed using partial data. The partial results are showing a positive relation between the educational software utilization and the academic achievement, regardless of the age or the school level of the user. The relevance of the study for the Romanian educational research resides in its novelty as well as in the development of the conceptual model. Furthermore, the study may have benefits for teachers, in their quest for enhancing their students’ performance via the use of educational software. The limitations of the study, residing in its one-time, transversal, correlational nature require further research to identify eventual differences among school-based and home-based use of software is needed, as well as for clarifying the role of additional variables in interplay between educational software usage and academic performance. A longitudinal follow-up on the students’ academic performance evolution in relation with the educational software utilization would provide further insight in the stability and the validity of the hypothesized influence pathways. |
