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.
