A Decision Support System for Subject Area Selection for Students Transiting from Junior Secondary School to Senior Secondary School

Abstract

The majority of Junior Secondary School (JSS 3) students find it extremely challenging to select the most appropriate subject area for Senior Secondary School 1(SSS 1) due to diverse conflicting decision criteria such as friends and parents' influence in the decision-making process. The decision problem is extremely important for the students and the society at large because making the wrong choice may negatively affect the students' academic performance at the senior secondary school level and the tertiary school level. To assist students in making the appropriate choice for their future career development a decision support system based on the VIKOR method is presented. The technique has substantial mathematical calculation and to make the use of the tool simple it was implemented in PHP programming language. The decision support system software was tested with an example of a JSS 3 student transiting to SSS1 subject area selection problem. Three alternative subject areas: science, social science, and art are considered. The performance of the three subject areas was evaluated with respect to five decision criteria: student academic performance, parents influence, student interest, career prospect, and friends/peers' influence. The result of the analysis showed that science is the best subject area for the student. The developed software is flexible as it can solve multicriteria decision problem with numerous alternatives and decision criteria. The decision support system software was further validated by using it to analyse a decision problem in the literature previously solved with a TOPSIS based license software. The analysis showed that the decision support system software produces the same result as the TOPSIS based license software.