Gender and Academic Utilization of Smartphone among Pre-service Teachers in Nigeria

Abstract

The study investigates “Gender and academic Utilization of Smartphone among Pre-service Teachers†The design adopted for this study was a descriptive survey research design. The study was guided by two research objectives, two research questions and two null hypotheses which were tested at (0.05) level of significance. The population for the study is fifteen thousand one hundred and three pre-service teachers from three colleges of education. A random sampling technique was used to determine the sample from the population. The sample has a total population of 4826 pre-service teachers. The sample size of 357 was obtained using Krejcie and Morgan Table for determining sample size. The instruments used for data collection was a research questionnaire titled smartphone availability questionnaire which was adapted from Anigbo (2015) and validated by three experts. Frequency count and the percentage was used to analyze the demographic data, the mean and standard deviation was used to answer the research questions and independent t-Test was also used in testing the null hypotheses at (0.05) level of significance. From the result, all null hypotheses were rejected. The findings indicate that the gender gap exists among pre-service teachers in the academic utilization of smartphone in colleges of education. Male pre-service teachers use their smartphone to do assignment than female counterpart while female pre-service teachers read and download e-books using their smartphone than their male counterparts. Gender gaps exist among pre-service teachers in the challenges faced during academic utilization of smartphone in colleges of education. Female pre-service teachers face difficulties when uploading, locating and downloading relevant educational documents using smartphones than their male counterpart.