Career Decision Support System For Graduating High School Students

Abstract

This study aimed to create and evaluate an online decision support system (DSS) which allows students to take a multiple intelligence test, determine their most dominant intelligence, suggest the most suitable courses to take for college and provide an interpretation for the result of the evaluation. The system captures the knowledge of an expert in guidance and counseling and embodied it to its knowledge base using fuzzy logic, graph search, and depth-first search. The system was tested at the University of Iloilo–Basic Education Department, Iloilo City, and Tabugon National High School, Tabugon, Dingle, Iloilo by a conveniently chosen graduating high school students. The result of the system was evaluated by 39 guidance counselors from the different secondary schools from the province and city of Iloilo. The evaluation of the system’s functionality was assessed by 15 respondents from the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector using the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9126. The reliability of the system was evaluated by comparing the system output with the two other assessment tools from Western Visayas College of Science and Technology (Weber standard) and the University of Iloilo (NDDCTE standard). Using Cramer’s V, the result of the evaluation of the NDDCTE standard as compared to the Decision Support System of the data taken from the University of Iloilo and the data taken from Tabugon National High School has a significant relationship. It implies that there is no significant difference in the results of the two evaluations. The result of the evaluation using Cramer’s V of the Weber standard as compared to the Decision Support System of the data taken from the University of Iloilo and the data taken from Tabugon National High School has a significant relationship. It implies that the two results are highly related to each other. Using arithmetic mean (M) and standard deviation (SD), the result of the evaluation of the system’s output based on the perception of 39 guidance counselors resulted in a “Very Satisfactory” result. This implies that the system generates the dominant intelligence of the student, provide accurate course and study tips based on his/ her dominant intelligence. The evaluation of the respondents to the system’s software quality characteristics based on ISO 9126 resulted in a value described as “Very Effective”. It confirmed that the overall software characteristics of the system passed the ISO 9126 standards.