Evaluation of factors associated with the adoption of ICT in education using machine learning

Abstract

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) affect all aspects of our daily lives. Using them is considered a symbol of modernization and social advancement. The global expansion and interconnection of ICT offers a significant opportunity to promote the advancement of humanity, bridge the digital gap and promote the growth of societies built on knowledge. In this study, we analyzed and identified the most influential factors in the adoption of ICT in education from the data set called “Final Survey-Digital Inclusion Teachers” of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, which consists of 871 instances and 189 columns. We performed feature selection by carefully combining the results of three feature selection methods: filter (chi-square, ANO-VA and mutual information), wrapper (RFE) and intrinsic (Classification And Regression Trees, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting and XGBoost). The results demonstrated that a teacher's motivation for curricular planning that includes ICT, teaching experience and the institutional environment are key factors in the adoption of these technologies in education. Furthermore, we identified that the Random Forest algorithm is the most appropriate for analyzing and predicting the adoption of ICT in education, we affirmed this after this algorithm obtained the highest values in four of the six metrics evaluated: a sensitivity of 77.7%, an F1 Score of 77.9%, a Cohen's Kappa coefficient of 60.8% and a Jaccard Score of 64.3%. These results suggest that Random Forest is the most effective algorithm to analyze the factors related to the adoption of ICT in educational environments.