An investigation on factors affecting the further education desires of youth in Sri Lanka & a decision support tool for data mining

Abstract

Education plays an important role in the development of a country. Sri Lanka has given priority to widen access to education and has taken measures but whether everyone gets the equal opportunity to education is still open to question. This has been considered in an island wide National Youth Survey, conducted in the year 2000 which has been a joint undertaking involving United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and six Sri Lankan and German Institutions. The main aim of the survey has been to collect up-to-date and reliable information about opinions, values, perceptions, concerns, grievances and aspirations of the young generation in Sri Lanka. Further it has aimed at the identification and better understanding of the main commitment and ideas to solve them. It has been intended to provide a scientific database to assist policy makers and development organizations. The data set collected in this survey has data on specific segments related to youth in the age spectrum 15-29 years. This set of data is subjected to a social research. In this study, statistical evidence is sought to follow the proceedings of data mining.

A statistical modeling approach has been used in the analysis. The type of Further Educational Desire of a person has been found to be mainly related with the Type of Current Activity in terms of current employment status and so on, Educational Level, Province, Gender, Social Class and Age Group. Moreover, sufficient statistical evidence has been available to say that even, the Financial Situation in Past and the Major Problems Occurred in Education have an effect on developing their further educational desires. The importance of these findings is that they can be useful to understand the facilities and opportunities to be provided for students to assist in their education and to achieve their ultimate educational and career goals. Besides that, the information could be useful to assist in educational reforms and policy making. A decision support tool has been developed using the rule based method in data mining using the information furnished by the inferential statistical analysis. The social characteristics "Type of Current Activity", "Educational Level", "Province", "Gender", "Social Class" and "Age Group" were found to be directly influential in predicting the type of further educational desires of youth and they were used in developing the decision support tool. It predicts what type of educational desires can be there with the individuals in a selected sample of youth. These predictions can be observed by any individual education provider or an organization before launching their educational centers targeting the selected population.