A comparative study of student's attitudes among IT and non-IT students in Information Technology education

Abstract

This paper proposes a two-fold study: (1) to investigate the factors affecting behavior intention of Thai students for choosing Information Technology (IT) program and (2) based on the findings in (1), to make comparison analyses on the IT students versus those of other professional programs. The web-based questionnaire was employed to collect data from a focused set of 200 1styear students, studying in public universities in Thailand. The result of (1), using factor analysis, points out that the factors affecting students' behavioral intention to choose IT program can be categorized into three dimensions: personal characteristics, social influence and IT intention. The result of statistical analyses, incl. ANOVA, show that IT students hold some distinctive values of attitudinal attributes when choosing the program of study. Based on the findings, IT schools are suggested common strategies to attract targeted students and adjust the program's attributes to suit the students.