The development and facilitation of information technology education have been an important project under government policy. The purpose is to improve the nation’s competitiveness by the promotion of the general public’s information technology competency. This research aims to assess the current status of the basic computer competencies of senior-level elementary school students in Nantou County, hopefully to understand the achievement of the current information technology education in Nantou County, and to offer some advices on the improvement of future information technology education.
The essential purposes of this study are as followed: 1.To explore the current status of basic computer competency of senior-level elementary school students. 2.To explore if there is any differentiation of basic computer competency between different genders?
This study divide the evaluation of basic computer competency into five core capability areas: The cognition of information technology concept, the exercising of information technology, the processing and analyzing of data, the recognition and application of Internet, and the integration of information technology competency and humanity. This research used Nantou elementary school senior graders as test population. It sampled senior graders students from 18 elementary schools within 13 towns with on-line test. There were 702 students taken the test; 678 were retrieved. The retrieval rate is 96.5%; there were 638 test cases accepted after review; making the effective retrieval rate 90.8%. The accepted test-cases were analyzed by SPSS 10.0 software, and the statistical methods used including descriptive statistics, independent sample t-test. The results of the analysis depict the current status of the basic computer competency of senior-level elementary school students in Nantou County at moderate level. There is significant differentiation of basic computer competency between different genders as evidenced from this research.
There are some suggestions according to the results of this research: (1) foster more information education teachers. (2) enhance the design consistency for information education curriculum. (3) enhance and maintain the software and hardware equipments for information technology education. In order to promote the students’ basic computer competencies are being overall promoted, to confront the new information era.
