Rationale

Education is one of the most important aspects of Human Development as it

enhances people's awareness of themselves and world. Academic performance is
anything that students achieve in class, a laboratory, a library, or field work at school,
college, or university. Students are the most important assets in school. Their academic
performance plays an important role in creating the quality of an alumna who will
become a leader and manpower of our country and responsible for the country’s social
and economic development (Ali et.al, 2009).
Since the outbreak of the pandemic, the education sectors have thought of
various strategies to cope up with the situation and decided to administer distance
learning which includes purely online classes, blended learning of online and modular
classes, and purely modular classes that the schools and universities have adopted.
One of the universities in Bohol that adapts the online learning is University of Bohol.
With that, technology is considered an integral in the learning process.
In higher education student seeking compliance with learning and research
requirements, smartphones, tablets, other gadgets, and internet connection play a very
important role. However, the internet has become a major source of concern for
parents, since certain online activities may substantially divert the attention of the
students from their assignments. With the online setting, the channel of learning is the
internet, but in some areas, there are students who have difficulty in accessing internet
or cannot access the internet, at all. While most students possess updated gadgets that
are of great help on their classes, some own outdated versions of gadgets that cannot
cater all the applications needed for online class, there are also some that do not
possess anything at all. With this, students have encountered difficulties influencing
their studies and performance.
With the new normal setting, students are experiencing random and several
factors that may affect their academic performance, but the researchers only focused on
the most trivial factor, the technology – which is composed of the gadgets used and the
internet connection. The respondents of the study are 30 second-year Bachelor of
Science in Accountancy (BSA) students of University of Bohol for the school year 2020-
2021. The researchers chose University of Bohol because it is one of the schools that
used online learning method. BSA students are chosen as respondents for the reason
that Accountancy Program has strictness with regards to grade compliance. Through
the predicaments experienced by the students, the researchers are inspired to conduct
this study to examine the relationship between technology usage and academic
performance among students of higher education, in the hope that the teaching staff as
well as the students would be enlightened of the unprecedented educational crisis.
Interpretation/Conclusion
There is low correlation between technology and the academic performance of
the students during online classes. It implies that they have a positive correlation, but it
is weak and most likely insignificant. This denotes that in online class setting,
technology usage does not necessarily affect the student’s academic performance.