The successful adoption of technology is becoming increasingly important to functional independence. The present article reports findings from the Center for Research and Education on Aging and Technology Enhancement (CREATE) on the use of technology among communitydwelling adults. The sample included 1,204 individuals ranging in age from 18–91 years. All participants completed a battery that included measures of demographic characteristics, self-rated health, experience with technology, attitudes toward computers, and component cognitive abilities. Findings indicate that the older adults were less likely than younger adults to use technology in general, computers, and the World Wide Web. The results also indicate that computer anxiety, fluid intelligence, and crystallized intelligence were important predictors of the use of technology. The relationship between age and adoption of technology was mediated by cognitive abilities, computer self-efficacy, and computer anxiety. These findings are discussed in terms of training strategies to promote technology adoption.

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Factors Predicting the Use of Technology: Findings From the Center for Research and Education on Aging and Technology Enhancement (CREATE)

Previous reviews of the literature on the relationship between age and job performance have largely focused on core task performance but have paid much less attention to other job behaviors that also contribute to productivity. The current study provides an expanded meta-analysis on the relationship between age and job performance that includes 10 dimensions of job performance: core task performance, creativity, performance in training programs, organizational citizenship behaviors, safety performance, general counterproductive work behaviors, workplace aggression, on-the-job substance use, tardiness, and absenteeism. Results show that although age was largely unrelated to core task performance, creativity, and performance in training programs, it demonstrated stronger relationships with the other 7 performance dimensions. Results also highlight that the relationships of age with core task performance and with counterproductive work behaviors are curvilinear in nature and that several sample characteristics and data collection characteristics moderate age-performance relationships. The article concludes with a discussion of key research design issues that may further knowledge about the age-performance relationship in the future.

The relationship of age to ten dimensions of job performance.

Review: Computer use by older adults: A multi-disciplinary review

Possible implications of aging for interface designers

Why are older adults reluctant to adopt new technology, such as the Internet, given its potential to improve the quality of their lives? We review evidence indicating that attitudes and abilities are among the most powerful predictors of technology use. We conclude that normative age-related changes in ability must be taken into account when designing products and training programs for aging adults, and we discuss new tools to support designers. The most promising emerging technologies likely lie in training cognitive abilities and augmenting or substituting for impaired abilities. We discuss reasons to expect that the lag in technology adoption between younger and older adults may lessen but will not disappear in future generations.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/20696044

Aging and Information Technology Use Potential and Barriers

Given the aging of the workforce and the general population, it is important to determine how best to train older adults to use computers. Generally, research has shown that training takes significantly more time for older adults compared with younger learners, and that older adults commit more errors in post-training evaluations. This paper reviews research demonstrating age differences in learning to use a computer. We also explore the effects of attitudes, anxiety, and cognitive abilities on computer use, as well as research on training novices to use computers. Finally, we discuss designing the human-computer interface for the advantage of older users.

Issues in training older adults to use computers

Novice (Experiment 1) and experienced (Experiment 2) young, middle-aged, and older adults learned a new word-processing application in keystrokes, menus, or menus-plus-icons interface conditions. Novices showed strong age differences in the time to complete the 3-day tutorial and in declarative and procedural tests of word-processing knowledge. Menus and menus-plus-icons were superior to keystrokes condition. though interface did not interact with age. Experienced users showed age-related slowing in learning rate but minimal age differences in test performance when retrained on a new word-processing program. Age and computer experience accounted for much of the variance in both learning time and word-processing performance; interface type, speed of processing, and spatial generation ability made additional contributions. Experience interacted with age to predict performance. Implications for training and retraining older workers are discussed.

Word-processing training and retraining: effects of adult age, experience, and interface.

An important goal of human-computer interaction research is the reliable measurement of user performance. Although a fair amount of attention has been devoted to assessing the reliability and validity of paper-and-pencil measures of user satisfaction and other components of usability, reliability statistics for performance measures are rarely presented. Issues in reliability assessment of performance measures are discussed, and the reliability analysis of a scoring scheme used in our work is presented.

Catherine L. Kelley

Papers

Issues in training older adults to use computers

Word-processing training and retraining: effects of adult age, experience, and interface.

Reliability of User Proficiency Measurement Technique