Do Undergraduates Use their Personal Computers to Support Learning?

Computer activity data was extracted from the personal laptops of eighteen third-year students who self-reported as being skilled computer users. The analysis of the data revealed that non-academic use of students’ personal computers was significantly higher compared with academic use. This was the case concerning the discrepancies between what students’ self-reported as their level of use compared with their actual use. The findings illustrate that personal computers were not as crucial to undergraduate academic study as expected. In addition, the findings offer important insights into the benefits—in understanding actual practice—of using data-capturing techniques aimed at gathering naturally-occurring data.