Predicting Media Literacy Level of Secondary School Students in Fiji

The digital revolution has set a platform for all the information and means of communication to be digitised, thus creating a digital media society. This explosion of digital media requires individuals to have a set of skills and knowledge to survive in this lifelong digital media society. In such a context, many countries around the world are now leveraging on Media Literacy to enhance the necessary skills of individuals and improve upon responsible media engagement. Therefore, predicting media literacy of students is essential so that suitable interventions can be put in place. This paper presents an analysis of Media Literacy status of Year 12 and Year 13 students at randomly selected secondary schools in Fiji, and it presents a set of predictive models using classification techniques. A quantitative study using a reliable survey was conducted to determine the Media Literacy of students using a Likert scale of 1-5. The analysis for this study was using the R software whereby classification algorithms such as Random Forest Classifiers, Decision Trees and Support Vector Machine Algorithm (SVM) were used to build the predictive models. These models will be used to derive appropriate interventions to improve Media Literacy of students. The baseline data from the study provide information on media literacy of Fijian students. The paper concludes with the important attributes that contribute towards an individual’s competency on media literacy.