This paper presents the results of a study designed to determine the computer anxiety, attitudes, and confidence levels of students enrolling in preservice teacher education computing courses. Specific questions compared these students with national norms, and looked to see whether sex, age, or past computer experiences had any effect on measures of student enjoyment of using computers, their computer anxiety and confidence levels, and their perceptions of the usefulness of computers. Data were collected from 518 college students (394 female, 108 male, and 16 not reported). Results indicated that prior knowledge and experience with computers correlate highly with student attitudes toward computer use. This relationship indicates that these earlier experiences were generally successful, even though the majority of the experiences consisted of recreational computer games and simple word processing. Approximately 32% of the variance in anxiety scores, 30% of the variance in confidence scores, and 10% of the variance in usefulness scores were shared by previous word processing, recreation, programming, and database experience. Removing sex, age, and experience using spreadsheets did not significantly change the predictive value of the equation for the anxiety, confidence, or usefulness subscale scores. It is concluded that student attitudes toward working with computers are important indicators of the ways in which students will use computers when they become teachers in their own classroom settings. (9 references) (DB)