Abstract
IT education can be summarized as persuading the educatee to accept IT. The persuasion is made by delivering the messages for how-to-use and where-to-use to the educatee, which leads formulation of a belief structure for using IT. Therefore, message based persuasion theory, as well as IT acceptance theories such as technology acceptance model(TAM), would play a very important role for explaining IT education. According to elaboration likelihood model(ELM) that has been considered as one of the most influential persuasion theories, people change attitude or perception by two routes, central route and peripheral route. In central route, people would think critically about issue-related arguments in an informational message. In peripheral route, subjects rely on cues regarding the target behavior with less cognitive efforts. Moreover, such persuasion process is not a one-shot program but continuous repetition with feedbacks, which leads to changing a belief structure for using IT. An educatee would get more knowledge and experiences of using IT as following an education program, and be more dependent on a central route than a peripheral route. Such change would reformulate a belief structure which is different from the intial one. The objectives of this study are the following two: First, an identification of the relationship between ELM and belief structures for using IT. Especially, we analyze the effects of message interpretation through both of central and peripheral routes on perceived usefulness which is an important explaining variable in TAM and perceived use control which have perceived ease of use and perceived controllability as sub-dimensions. Second, a longitudinal analysis of the above effects. In other words, change of the relationship between interpretation of message delivered by IT education and beliefs of IT using is analyzed longitudinally. For achievement of our objectives, we suggest a research model, which is constructed as three-layered. While first layer has a dependent variable, use intention, second one has perceived usefulness and perceived use control that has two sub-concepts, perceived ease of use and perceived controllability. Finally, third one is related with two routes in ELM, source credibility and argument quality which are operationalization of peripheral route and central route respectively. By these variables, we suggest five hypotheses. In addition to relationship among variables, we suggest two additional hypotheses, moderation effects of time in the relationships between perceived usefulness and two routes. That is, source credibility's influence on perceived usefulness is decreased as time flows, and argument quality's influence is increased. For validation of it, our research model is tested empirically. With measurements which have been validated in the other studies, we survey students in an Excel class two times for longitudinal analysis. Data Analysis is done by partial least square(PLS), which is known as an appropriate approach for multi-group comparison analysis with a small sized sample as like this study. In result. all hypotheses are statistically supported. One of theoretical contributions in this study is an analysis of IT education based on ELM and TAM which are considered as important theories in psychology and IS theories respectively. A longitudinal analysis by comparison between two surveys based on PLS is also considered as a methodological contribution. In practice, finding the importance of peripheral route in early stage of IT education should be notable.
