Adolescence

2.1.1. A Stage of Human Development

To get prepared to enter the stage of adult, adolescents change in their cognitive methods and relationships with people besides experiencing puberty by aware of body maturity and emotional development (Newman & Newman, 1994) . All these changes reflect on their behaviors.

2.1.2. Formal Operation

People who can use formal operation are able to think logically about things existing only in their minds without imaged concrete things. Adolescents go through this conceptual develop change which help them make predictions, test hypotheses and draw conclusions through analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating things in an abstract, critical way to face to their future (Chapman, 1988; Klausmeier, 1985; Inhelder & Piaget, 1958; Klineberg, 1967;

Lessing, 1972; Piaget, 1970, 1972). And this ability makes studying from a computer program more possible because adolescents with formal operational thought can understand the symbols showed on the screen instead of depending on operating real things or virtual concrete things.

2.1.3. Group Identity

At the stage of adolescence, adolescents develop a more structured and organized peer group.

To be accepted by a specific group and have emotional intimation, reasoning, and support, addition to having partnership and fun which is important at earlier stages, becomes more important now. And peer group identity’s importance exceeds parents’ influence (Newman, 1982; Hunter & Youniss, 1982; Hopkins, 1983; Newman & Newman, 1994) . Talking, no matter in face-to-face or on-the-phone way, to friends becomes a major activity of adolescents (Raffaelli & Duckett, 1989) .

It’s easy to understand because when adolescents grow into adults, they need to work together with people of their similar age, so having a group identity become the most important task of this stage, if they fail, they will get identity confusion and leads to difficulties in health, working, and forming a close family later in their lives ( Newman &

Newman, 1994; East, Hess & Lerner, 1987; Spencer, 1982, 1988) .

This feature makes traditional classroom teaching very difficult because the students are more interested in communicating with peers and attracting peer’s attention than in listening to what the teacher is trying to inspire them.

2.1.4. Internet Behavior

Adolescents spent much time on the Internet, some of them even surf it more than twenty hours a week, most of them use home computer with experience surfing the internet for about 2 to 4 years or more. And the main use motives are information retrieval and unreal relationship, while their primary motives to surf the internet are download files and obtain latest information (Liu, 2003; Lu, 2006) .

2.2 E-Learning

2.2.1. The Trend

In Canada, US, UK and Korea, e-Learning has been many learners’ choice. Some website even has nearly 60,000 users and more than 2,500 higher institutions provide courses on it.

More and more people are opting for distance learning courses and fully-online degree programs, partially because a higher degree can bring a higher earning, and users choose e-Learning mainly because of time and place flexibility (Shay.& Rees, 2004; Saunders &

Pincas (2004); Abrami, Bernard, Wade, Schmid, Borokhovski, Tamim, Surkes, Lowerison, Zhang, Nicolaidou, Newman, Wozney, & Peretiatkowicz, 2006) .

Furthermore, the economic effects make institutions willing to offer courses on line, and make students be willing to take the courses.

In general, the internet has the following impacts: (Downes, 2005)

z digitization - many assets that existed as physical assets are now digital assets,

z disintermediation - in many cases, intermediary management and administrative bodies are no longer required

z capacity - the productive capacities of individuals and groups is increased, reducing the need to contract specialized services

In e-Learning, digitalized learning materials are on Net and connect one another by hyperlinks, they can be reused many times until the contents they bring out of date. This cuts lots of the cost the e-Learning providers, the learners are able to spend much less to receive more, too. Thus e-Learning become a trend in many countries.

2.2.2. Application of e-Learning

Besides used in undergraduate and postgraduate studying, e-Learning has been used also in teachers’ development programs, adults’ continue education, teaching math, promote creativity and critical thinking in middle school ( Mohammed, Waddington, & Donnan, 2008;

Dalsgaard & Mathiasen, 2008; Saunders & Pincas, 2004; Grant &Thornton, 2007; Lebec &

Luft, 2007; Isman & Yaratan, 2005; Rastogi & Pawar, 2007; Muirhead, 2004 ; Walker ,2005;

Daithí Ó Murchú and Brent Muirhead, 2005). E-Learning is considered as a solution of offering individualized education, too, for the abilities of applying flexible multidimensional data model and individual content, though the efforts of enhancing individualized interaction between the learners and the content in e-Learning systems are still needed ( Tavangarian, Leypold, Nolting, Roser &Voigt, 2004) .

2.3 Factors Affecting e-Learning

There are lots of studies on the attitude and behavior of undergraduate and postgraduate e-Learning, as far as its profound usage, very few articles discuss about its acceptance. In these studies, many factors influent e-Learning attitude and behavior are found, such as age, learning style, social influence and so on. These factors may be helpful to infer factors influent acceptance of adolescence e-Learning which is still in its infancy.

2.3.1. Personal Specific 2.3.1.1. Age

A study found that master students have higher score on “learning strategy” than bachelor students. Also, master students’ evaluation of their e-Learning experience increased significantly throughout the course. A possible reason was that master students understand the benefits of e-Learning better and know more about the learning strategies needed for university coursework than bachelor students do (Nakayama, Yamamoto & Santiago, 2007) . This study is interested in, as for adolescents, will age, which can be inferred by grade in this study, influent their learning strategies and perceived benefits of e-Learning and thus elder students have more perceived usefulness? And will students of similar age have different acceptance to e-Learning because they belong to different divisions of school?

Furthermore, we have hypotheses of

H1-1-1: Grade has no influence to students’ perceived usefulness of e-Learning H1-1-2: Grade has no influence to students’ perceived easy of use of e-Learning H1-1-3: Grade has no influence to students’ attitude towards e-Learning

H1-1-4: Grade has no influence to students’ intention of use of e-Learning And

H1-2-1: Division has no influence to students’ perceived usefulness of e-Learning H1-2-2: Division has no influence to students’ perceived easy of use of e-Learning H1-2-3: Division has no influence to students’ attitude towards e-Learning

H1-2-4: Division has no influence to students’ intention of use of e-Learning 2.3.1.2. Social Influence

Findings of a study on undergraduate e-Learning behavior show the mean influences of instructors and mentors to be substantially higher than those of peers. Additionally, the findings show that instructor and mentor influence are significant factors that impact students’ perceived usefulness of the course delivery system, while only mentor influence is significantly associated with perceived ease-of-use of the system. However, in both regression analyses, peer influence is not a significant factor (Shen, Laffey, Lin, & Huang, 2006) . It is interesting that adults include instructors and parents, or peers which include classmates and friends have more influence to adolescence e-Learning acceptance? Will the answer follow the stage development theory in section 2.1? This study is going to find it out.

And the hypotheses are:

H2-1-1: Peers have no influence to students’ perceived usefulness of e-Learning H2-1-2: Peers have no influence to students’ perceived easy of use of e-Learning

H2-1-3: Peers have no influence to students’ attitude towards e-Learning H2-1-4: Peers have no influence to students’ intention of use of e-Learning And

H2-2-1: Adults have no influence to students’ perceived usefulness of e-Learning H2-2-2: Adults have no influence to students’ perceived easy of use of e-Learning H2-2-3: Adults have no influence to students’ attitude towards e-Learning

H2-2-4: Adults have no influence to students’ intention of use of e-Learning 2.3.2. Learning Style

Recent literature on e-Learning also found that not all students perform successfully in online courses. Research reports have indicated that one of student success is learning styles (Diaz

& Cartnal, 1999; Gagne, Briggs & Wager1992; Terrell & Dringus, 2000; Zhang & Sternberg, 2001; Minoru Nakayama, Hiroh Yamamoto and Rowena Santiago, 2007). And further studies are expected to find out how different learning style influent e-Learning behavior and how to help students of each learning style to achieve success in their online courses

CHAPTER 3 METHOD

This study tries to find out if either age or social influence is one of the factors to adolescence e-Learning acceptance. From literature review, we construct two frameworks of study-- age and social influence. By descriptive statistics and Pearson’s analyses, this study checks the relationships between students’ age and perceived usefulness of e-Learning, perceived easy of use of e-Learning, attitude to e-Learning, intention of use of e-Learning; also the relationships between students’ social influence and perceived usefulness of e-Learning, perceived easy of use of e-Learning, attitude to e-Learning, intention of use of e-Learning on the base of questionnaire investigation and examine the results by t-test.