Impacting factors and degree of influence on the selection of ICT subject in GCE Advanced Level

Abstract

Education in Sri Lankan education focuses on accelerating the country’s knowledge economy by producing skilled and knowledgeable people who suit present-day needs. Moreover, society wants universities to produce graduates, and of course, those graduates must be employable. Meanwhile, job opportunity is guaranteed for job seekers skilled in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) nowadays. Thus, the Sri Lankan government introduced a new stream “Technology” in the year 2015 as an educational reform. The success level of this government initiative should be measured in an acceptable form for further improvements. The most productive way to measure success measuring the interest of students in ICT on GCE A/L, and the factors that influence it. This study was conducted to examine the factors fluencing ICT subject selection by GCE Advanced Level students and to find out the degree of influence of each factor. The coastal region area of Ampara district of Sri Lanka was covered as a sample population for our study. Data to find out the influencing factors were collected by having One on-One interviews with four categories of stakeholder groups, namely principals or deputy principals, teachers, students, and parents, and prepared a questionnaire with these factors and distributed among the A/L students from different schools to gather their opinions from 266 respondents to find out the degree of influence of factors using the convenience sampling technique. Later, the answers to the questionnaire were analyzed by a statistical data analysis tool which shows that the family income, awareness programme, other main subjects in A/L, and the results of mathematics, English, and ICT subjects in O/L are affecting the ICT subject selection in A/L, meanwhile the results says that gender, parents’ education, and previously followed ICT related courses are not having relations in A/L ICT subject selection, and it revealed the degree of top encouraging factors such job market, opportunities in higher education, and getting high z-score and discouraging factors such lack of resources available in the medium, having no relevancy with other main subjects, and lack of interest in IT.