Study habits and internet efficacy as correlates of undergraduates’ attitudes towards reading

Abstract

The dawn of 21st century technological explosion ushered a decline in students’ attitude towards reading. This technological incident appears to have created high level of illiteracy, social-media addict, drop-out rate, academic failure and campus loafing among undergraduates in the Nigerian society. This motivated an investigation on the predictive influence of study habit and Internet efficacy on undergraduates’ attitude towards reading in Nigerian Universities. This study adopted descriptive survey research design of ex-post-facto type. A total of 198 (female = 101 and male = 97) respondents were randomly sampled. Two research questions and two hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance.

The result showed that Internet-efficacy negatively correlated with attitude towards reading, while study habit positively correlated with attitude towards reading. The two variables accounted for 68.6% (Adj.R²= .686) variance in the prediction of attitude towards reading. The most potent variable that predicted attitude towards reading was study habit (β = .689, t= 9.214, P<0.01), followed by Internet efficacy (β = -.161, t = -2.153, P<0.05). This implies that high study habit predetermines high attitude towards reading among undergraduates. University students need to be engaged in advanced and critical-thinking projects that will make them study continuously so that they might develop a good reading attitude.

Keywords: Study habit, Internet efficacy and Attitude towards reading