Relationship between Technology Acceptance and Self-Directed Learning: Mediation Role of Positive Emotions and Technological Self-Efficacy

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors;

Although the study deals with a perfect subject, the method has serious problems.

First of all, I could not understand the model. How are these model variables measured? In particular, the technology acceptance model is a structure consisting of basically four factors (Perceived usefulness, Perceived ease of use, intention to use, and actual use). Why did you collect it under one factor? There are many extended TAM models in the literature. What are the missing aspects of these models in the literature? What is the advantage of your model? Such a model made no sense to me. 

Of course, you are free to establish such a model, but if you want to write a scientific article, you cannot ignore the literature. Please focus on TAM, TAM2, UTAUAUT, and UTAUAUT2 models and revise yours.

There is no support from the literature for each hypothesis you create. For example, there are many models where enjoyment is included as an external variable in the extended TAM models. Why was such a model not established?

The representativeness of the sample is not specified. Sampling method not specified. The ratio of 501 samples by age distribution is not specified.

Please always show your survey items in a table form. Your study is missing factor loadings, discriminant validity, convergent validity, inter-item correlations, etc.

The correlation table between each sub-factor and the factors presented within the framework of the model is not given.

The fitting indices look so perfect. How could be happened? Please explain in your result section. 

Alternative models in the results section make no sense academically. The background of these models should be discussed within the literature framework. This will be an article!

Author Response

Dear Reviewer：

Thank you very much for taking the time to review our article. Thank you for your suggestion. All your suggestions are very invaluable, and they are important for our thesis writing and scientific research work. Below we will reply to your comments one by one. Please see the attachment.

Point  1：Although the study deals with a perfect subject, the method has serious problems.

First of all, I could not understand the model. How are these model variables measured?

Authors’  Response   1：

Thank you for your suggestion. Based on existing research, we built the current research model. The model includes four variables: technology acceptance, positive emotions, technological self-efficacy, and self-directed learning. Each variable was measured using a scientific questionnaire, the specifics of which was reported in the Measure section of the manuscript. At the same time, following your suggestions, we have reported the validation factor analysis, factor loading, discriminant validity, convergence effectiveness and project-to-project correlation in the Results section. You can see specifically in Tables 2, 3 and 6 of the manuscript.

 

 

Point  2：In particular, the technology acceptance model is a structure consisting of basically four factors (Perceived usefulness, Perceived ease of use, intention to use, and actual use). Why did you collect it under one factor?

Authors’  Response   2：

Thank you for your suggestion. For measurements of technology acceptance models, we assessed students’ perceptions of technology acceptance based on validated questionnaires from Davis and Teo in educational settings. The questionnaire includes the four dimensions of perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, intention to use, and actual use that you mentioned. We relied on the following literature:

[12] Davis, F.D. Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and user acceptance of information technology. MIS Q. 1989, 13, 319-339. [CrossRef]

[13] Teo, T.; van Schaik, P. Understanding the intention to use technology by Preservice teachers: an empirical test of competing theoretical models. IJHCI. 2012, 28, 178-188. [CrossRef]

 

 

Point   3：There are many extended TAM models in the literature. What are the missing aspects of these models in the literature? What is the advantage of your model? Such a model made no sense to me. Of course, you are free to establish such a model, but if you want to write a scientific article, you cannot ignore the literature. Please focus on TAM, TAM2, UTAUAUT, and UTAUAUT2 models and revise yours.

Authors’  Response   3：

Thank you for your suggestion. Following your suggestions, we have added extended models and theoretical foundations related to technological acceptance models in the Literature section. The advantage of our model is to identify the factors that affect students’ self-directed learning in the technological environment by establishing the intermediary effect between technology acceptance and self-directed learning, in order to promote students to better learn independently in the technological environment. We added some factors that influence technology acceptance in the Literature section and Discussion section. You can see this in the Literature and Discussion section of the manuscript.

 

 

Point  4：There is no support from the literature for each hypothesis you create. For example, there are many models where enjoyment is included as an external variable in the extended TAM models. Why was such a model not established?

Authors’  Response   4：

Thank you for your suggestion. Following your suggestion, we have supplemented the relevant literature supporting the hypotheses.

The current study focused on the impact of students’ technology acceptance on self-directed learning, whether the acceptance and willingness of Chinese middle school students to technology will affect their self-directed learning behaviors and ability, and what factors affect their self-directed learning behaviors and ability through technology acceptance. We used the four of the more important factors in the TAM model without considering the extended TAM model contained in external variables. This is a limitation of our research. Your advice is very valuable, and in future research we will definitely focus on the external influencers involved in the technology acceptance extension model.

 

 

Point  5：The representativeness of the sample is not specified. Sampling method not specified. The ratio of 501 samples by age distribution is not specified.

Authors’  Response   5：

Thank you for your suggestion. Following you suggested, we have specified the sampling method and the ratio distributed by age in the Participants and Procedures section of the manuscript.

 

 

Point  6：Please always show your survey items in a table form. Your study is missing factor loadings, discriminant validity, convergent validity, inter-item correlations, etc. The correlation table between each sub-factor and the factors presented within the framework of the model is not given.

Authors’  Response   6：

        Thank you for your advice. We supplemented each sub-questionnaire with factor loadings and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Meanwhile, the discriminant validity and convergence validity of the measurement model are also reported, and these items are added in Table 3 in the section 3.2. The correlation between each sub-factor and the factors presented within the framework of the model are also shown in Figure 2.

Point  7：The fitting indices look so perfect. How could be happened? Please explain in your result section.

Authors’  Response   7：

        Thank you for your suggestion. Once again, we checked the scientific nature of the data collection process and the authenticity of the data. The Mplus8.3 software was used to fit, and the results showed that the relationship between the variables was indeed true. We also explained it in the Discussion section.

 

 

Point  8：Alternative models in the results section make no sense academically. The background of these models should be discussed within the literature framework. This will be an article!

Authors’  Response   8：

        Thank you for your suggestion. Following you suggested, we have removed the alternative model from the results and added a discussion of this section to the literature framework.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The way the article is written confuses the reader. The English language
makes it difficult to follow the story. Authors have to use the proper
terminology for a series of terms they use. Moreover, they have to
justify the terms' usage/application in their experimental design, as
they declare that they do.
In general, the authors should put more efforts into presenting a
logical rationale for their study and communicate their findings in a
way that is compatible with their conceptual and methodological
framework.
In several places the language is not very readable and the authors
should have a proof reading of their text before final publication.
The Methodology part should be a section on its own and be explained more. The evaluation part seems very interesting and should be explained more. The findings are
also good and the future work looks promising. The authors should include more references regarding other related fields like game based learning and serious games (e.g. CMX MMORPG) and how they have been designed using relative design frameworks, evaluated with relative evaluation frameworks and be utilized using learning analytics.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer：

Thank you very much for taking the time to review our article. Thank you for your suggestions. All your suggestions are very invaluable, and they are important for our thesis writing and scientific research work. Below we will reply to your comments one by one. Please see the attachment.

Point   1：The way the article is written confuses the reader. The English language makes it difficult to follow the story. Authors have to use the proper terminology for a series of terms they use. Moreover, they have to justify the terms' usage/application in their experimental design, as they declare that they do.

Authors’    Response   1：

Thank you for your suggestion. Following your suggestion, we’ve reorganized the logic of the article, replacing the jargon and making the story clearer.

 

 

Point   2：In general, the authors should put more efforts into presenting a logical rationale for their study and communicate their findings in a way that is compatible with their conceptual and methodological framework.

Authors’    Response   2：

Thank you for your suggestion. Based on your suggestion, we have added logical rational for our research in the Introduction, Literature and Hypothesis section.

 

 

Point   3：In several places the language is not very readable and the authors should have a proof reading of their text before final publication.

Authors’    Response   3：

Thank you for your suggestion. Following your suggestion, we have re-read the manuscript and invited a native English speaker to check and correct the erroneous expressions of the text, completing the proofreading work.

 

 

Point   4：The Methodology part should be a section on its own and be explained more. The evaluation part seems very interesting and should be explained more. The findings are also good and the future work looks promising. The authors should include more references regarding other related fields like game based learning and serious games (e.g. CMX MMORPG) and how they have been designed using relative design frameworks, evaluated with relative evaluation frameworks and be utilized using learning analytics.

Authors’    Response   4：

        Thank you for your advice and for your affirmation of our research. As you suggested, we have included the methodology as a separate part and explained more about the methodology and discussion section. References in other relevant areas that you suggest are also supplemented.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The theoretical framework and methodology, and data analysis are well developed. On the other hand, it is relevant to specify the limits of the advanced results regarding the positive personal self-efficacy about technology and its acceptable use in education.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer：

Thank you very much for taking the time to review our article. Thank you for your suggestion. All your suggestions are very invaluable, and they are important for our thesis writing and scientific research work. Below we will reply to your comments one by one. Please see the attachment.

Point   1：The theoretical framework and methodology, and data analysis are well developed. On the other hand, it is relevant to specify the limits of the advanced results regarding the positive personal self-efficacy about technology and its acceptable use in education.

Authors’    Response    1：

        Thank you for your advice and for your affirmation of our research. Your suggestions are invaluable in enhancing the scientific nature of our research. Regarding the positive personal self-efficacy about technology and its acceptable use in education, we explained the limitations in the Discussion section. For example：

In the field of education, we cannot provide students with learning equipment and systems that do not match their age in order to improve their technological self-efficacy. Our findings suggest that in the context of the deep integration of ICT into educational teaching, educators should not only provide students with convenient and age-appropriate educational devices, but also enhance student’ belief in the ability to use technology to solve problems.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Hi;

If you measure the technology acceptance model as you show in figure 2, there is no technology acceptance model in your research. It becomes a meaningless factor until you explain the purpose more clearly with heavy literature support.

How was the revised research questionnaire created? For example, the original questions are as follows;

Using computers will improve my work.

Using computers will enhance my effectiveness.

Using computers will increase my productivity.

How did you ask 12-15 years old students these questions in a way they could understand? Even adults have trouble understanding the usefulness, effectiveness, productivity, etc. However,  your measurement model' construct validity and reliability are excellent. What were the filtering methods of your data? This perfection is reminiscent of artificiality.

The Chinese and English versions of the survey questions must be attached to your article. What is revised?

"Thank you for your suggestion. For measurements of technology acceptance models, we assessed students' perceptions of technology acceptance based on validated questionnaires from Davis and Teo in educational settings."

The answer above is not satisfactory. How did these authors measure the technology acceptance model (direct and indirect effects)? How did you measure? Why? It does not make any sense academically.

"This study found that technology acceptance could have a positive impact on self-directed learning, which was supported by previous studies [67]"

Are your scale same with reference 67? How can you write this sentence?

I think the work was rushed and contained significant problems.

Author Response

Point  1：If you measure the technology acceptance model as you show in figure 2, there is no technology acceptance model in your research. It becomes a meaningless factor until you explain the purpose more clearly with heavy literature support.

Authors’  Response   1：

Thank you for your suggestion. The focus of our research is to explore the influence of students’ technology acceptance on self-directed learning. Therefore, on the basis of reference to literature [1-3], we used the four factors that affect technology acceptance (perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, attitude towards using, and behavioral intention) to measure the degree of students’ technology acceptance. The purpose is to provide valuable reference for Chinese teachers and researchers to cultivate students’ self-directed learning ability under the background of deep integration of information technology into education and teaching, and guide students to better engage in self-directed learning.

[1] Pan, X. Technology Acceptance, Technological Self-Efficacy, and Attitude Toward Technology-Based Self-Directed Learning: Learning Motivation as a Mediator. Front. Psychol. 2020, 11, 68-78. [CrossRef]

[2] Pan, X.Q.; Chen, W. Modeling Teacher Supports Toward Self-Directed Language Learning Beyond the Classroom: Technology Acceptance and Technological Self-Efficacy as Mediators. Front. Psychol. 2021, 12, 1-14. [CrossRef]

[3] Chatzopoulos, A.; Kalogiannakis, M.; Papadakis, S.; Papoutsidakis, M. A Novel, Modular Robot for Educational Robotics Developed Using Action Research Evaluated on Technology Acceptance Model. Educ. Sci. 2022, 12, 274.

 

 

Point  2： How was the revised research questionnaire created? For example, the original questions are as follows;

Using computers will improve my work.

Using computers will enhance my effectiveness.

Using computers will increase my productivity.

How did you ask 12-15 years old students these questions in a way they could understand? Even adults have trouble understanding the usefulness, effectiveness, productivity, etc. However, your measurement model' construct validity and reliability are excellent. What were the filtering methods of your data? This perfection is reminiscent of artificiality.

The Chinese and English versions of the survey questions must be attached to your article. What is revised?

Authors’  Response   2：

Thank you for your suggestion. Our revised research questionnaire is based on Davis’ original questions, and English scholars with Chinese background are invited to translate. The detailed questionnaires are shown in Table 1-2. After completing the construction of the questionnaire, the researchers invited three experts to evaluate the content validity of the research scale. At the same time, we sampled 50 middle school students aged 12-15 years for pre-test, and evaluated the internal consistency reliability of the research scale by Cronbach coefficient, which met the requirements of the questionnaire test.

This questionnaire is based on the middle school students’ computer learning experience of information technology class. In the Chinese environment, middle school students aged 12-15 years have been exposed to computers since they were 6 years old in the third grade. Therefore, they are proficient in the use and learning of computers. When we distributed the questionnaire for the pre-test, we inquired the teachers of the sampled classes. In the communication with the teachers, we further made it clear that the students could fully understand the content designed by the questionnaire.

According to your suggestion, we re-checked the process of data collection and processing to ensure that the data was scientific and reasonable. In the process of data filtering, invalid questionnaires with answer time <180s, logic errors in confirmatory questions, and the same answer in more than 90% of questions were eliminated.

Table 1. The Chinese version of the survey questions.

Latent variables	Item	Observation variable
感知有用性	PU1	电脑对我的学习很重要
	PU2	电脑能够提高我的学习效率
	PU3	电脑能帮助我理解学习内容
感知易用性	PEU1	我觉得用电脑很简单
	PEU2	我能够用电脑解决学习问题
	PEU3	电脑能够使我更快地完成学习任务
使用态度	ATT1	我喜欢使用电脑
	ATT2	电脑使我的学习很有趣
	ATT3	我希望我的学习中能用到电脑
使用意愿	BI1	我打算在未来继续使用电脑学习
	BI2	我希望将来会使用电脑学习
	BI3	我计划在未来使用电脑学习

 

Table 2. The English version of the survey questions.

Latent variables	Item	Observation variable
Perceived Usefulness	PU1	Computer is very important to my study.
	PU2	Computer can improve my study efficiency.
	PU3	Computers can help me understand what I'm learning.
Perceived Ease of Use	PEU1	I think it's easy to use a computer.
	PEU2	I can use the computer to solve my study problems.
	PEU3	Computer can make me finish my study tasks faster.
Attitude towards using	ATT1	I like using computers.
	ATT2	Computers make my study very interesting.
	ATT3	I hope I can use computers in my studies.
Behavioral Intention	BI1	I plan to continue using computers to study in the future.
	BI2	I hope to use computers to study in the future.
	BI3	I plan to use computers to study in the future.

 

 

 

Point   3： "Thank you for your suggestion. For measurements of technology acceptance models, we assessed students' perceptions of technology acceptance based on validated questionnaires from Davis and Teo in educational settings."

The answer above is not satisfactory. How did these authors measure the technology acceptance model (direct and indirect effects)? How did you measure? Why? It does not make any sense academically.

Authors’  Response   3：

Thank you for your suggestion. We did not distinguish the direct and indirect effects in the technology acceptance model, which is the limitation of our study. In the future research on the impact of technology acceptance on self-directed learning, we will pay attention to the direct and indirect effects in the technology acceptance model. This study took the four factors affecting technology acceptance (perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, using attitude and willingness to use) as a whole to discuss the effects of technology acceptance of self-directed learning (the research also has been supported by the literature [1-3]), not only makes sense in theory, but also for teachers to improve students’ ability to self-directed learning to provide a scientific reference.

With the deep integration of information and communication technology into education and teaching, it is increasingly common for students to learn with the help of technology. However, teachers have encountered some difficulties in improving students’ self-directed learning ability in the information environment. The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of positive emotions and technological self-efficacy on students’ technology acceptance and self-directed learning. It is hoped to provide some references for Chinese teachers and researchers to cultivate students’ self-directed learning ability under the background of in-depth integration of information technology into education and teaching and guide students to better engage in self-directed learning.

[1] Pan, X. Technology Acceptance, Technological Self-Efficacy, and Attitude Toward Technology-Based Self-Directed Learning: Learning Motivation as a Mediator. Front. Psychol. 2020, 11, 68-78. [CrossRef]

[2] Pan, X.Q.; Chen, W. Modeling Teacher Supports Toward Self-Directed Language Learning Beyond the Classroom: Technology Acceptance and Technological Self-Efficacy as Mediators. Front. Psychol. 2021, 12, 1-14. [CrossRef]

[3] Chatzopoulos, A.; Kalogiannakis, M.; Papadakis, S.; Papoutsidakis, M. A Novel, Modular Robot for Educational Robotics Developed Using Action Research Evaluated on Technology Acceptance Model. Educ. Sci. 2022, 12, 274. [CrossRef]

 

 

 

Point  4： "This study found that technology acceptance could have a positive impact on self-directed learning, which was supported by previous studies [67]"

Are your scale same with reference 67? How can you write this sentence?

I think the work was rushed and contained significant problems.

Authors’  Response   4：

Thank you for your suggestion. We’re sorry for the misexpression here. We have changed the references here.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

In my opinion, the method used and the model developed do not have a scientific basis. No satisfactory answers were given to the last review's criticisms.