BANDURA'S SYMBOLIC LEARNING THROUGH ICT AND ITS IMPACT ON STUDENT LEARNING AT UNIVERSITY LEVEL IN PAKISTAN

Symbolic learning is a twenty first century idea of Social Learning Theory. It presents how people learn through media, particularly social media. The research study "Bandura's Symbolic learning through Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and its Impact on Students Learning at University Level in Pakistan" is essentially an attempt to explore the contents of two media, that is, internet and mobile phone. The objectives of the study were to enlist the university students' opinions about the learning opportunities through internet and mobile at university level at four Bandura's stages on symbolic learning model, and to obtain university teachers' views about availability of ICT facilities and their perception of media impact on students learning activities. It was a descriptive survey research conducted through two questionnaires, one for university students and second for university teachers. A multistage cluster sampling technique was used to select twelve universities out of twelve general universities having three social sciences departments, nine from Punjab and three from Islamabad Capital Territory. Sixty students were selected as a convenient sample from each university; twenty students and two teachers from each department were drawn from three departments of social sciences. The student sample was 720 (38%) of the population and teachers sample was 72 (25%) of the population. Two questionnaires were used to collect data about opinion of the students and teachers. Chi square and Frequency count were statistical techniques to make analysis of data by using SPSS. The study found out that students, at attention stage, had access to emails, data bases, digital books and search engines but they had no access to messengers, Facebook and Twitter on internet while on mobile phone, they had access to phonebooks, messages, calendar and Multimedia. At retention stage, the downloaded contents were the study material, songs, videos and job advertisement keeping them on hard drive or Universal Serial Bus (USB) data storage device and use of Microsoft Word and Power Point to write assignments and internet browsers to find problematic questions. The contents on mobile phone they used were talking, sending Short Message Service (SMS), watching movies, video clips and pictures. At reproduction stage, they used group discussion; academic forums, Wikipedia, digital libraries and search engines including free access sites, research journal, songs, digital books, movies, and Holy Quran. The contents on mobile phone were words and phrases, calculator, time watching, listening music, talking, sending text messages, playing video games and waking up alarm. At Motivation stage, the academic performance and internet use, role of social networks, digital libraries, online articles, discussion forums, students' blogs and professional associations mostly improved students' performance, vision, and studies. The motivation for mobile use was to keep in touch with teachers and students and storing study material on mobile phone. The teachers' views on Impact of ICT on student learning were significant as internet; ICT and Mobile Phone had positive effect on student learning. Digital libraries, social networks, professional groups, blogs and associations had significant positive effect on students learning. The digital contents would replace paper contents and students preferred to read online research articles. It is recommended that the students of social science be encouraged to use ICT in class and out of the class, the contents possibly be digitalized, access to all social networks be provided and ICT oriented tasks be provided by teachers to students.