Machine Learning Techniques for Determining Students' Academic Performance: A Sustainable Development Case for Engineering Education

Author(s):  
Sujan Poudyal ◽  
Morteza Nagahi ◽  
Mohammad Nagahisarchoghaei ◽  
Ghodsieh Ghanbari
2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Syed Abidi ◽  
Mushtaq Hussain ◽  
Yonglin Xu ◽  
Wu Zhang

Incorporating substantial, sustainable development issues into teaching and learning is the ultimate task of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). The purpose of our study was to identify the confused students who had failed to master the skill(s) given by the tutors as homework using the Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS). We have focused ASSISTments, an ITS in this study, and scrutinized the skill-builder data using machine learning techniques and methods. We used seven candidate models including: Naïve Bayes (NB), Generalized Linear Model (GLM), Logistic Regression (LR), Deep Learning (DL), Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), and Gradient Boosted Trees (XGBoost). We trained, validated, and tested learning algorithms, performed stratified cross-validation, and measured the performance of the models through various performance metrics, i.e., ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristic), Accuracy, Precision, Recall, F-Measure, Sensitivity, and Specificity. We found RF, GLM, XGBoost, and DL were high accuracy-achieving classifiers. However, other perceptions such as detecting unexplored features that might be related to the forecasting of outputs can also boost the accuracy of the prediction model. Through machine learning methods, we identified the group of students that were confused when attempting the homework exercise, to help foster their knowledge and talent to play a vital role in environmental development.


Predicting the academic performance of students has been an important research topic in the Educational field. The main aim of a higher education institution is to provide quality education for students. One way to accomplish a higher level of quality of education is by predicting student’s academic performance and there by taking earlyre- medial actions to improve the same. This paper presents a system which utilizes machine learning techniques to classify and predict the academic performance of the students at the right time before the drop out occurs. The system first accepts the performance parameters of the basic level courses which the student had already passed as these parameters also influence the further study. To pre- dict the performance of the current program, the system continuously accepts the academic performance parame- ters after each academic evaluation process. The system employs machine learning techniques to study the aca- demic performance of the students after each evaluation process. The system also learns the basic rules followed by the University for assessing the students. Based on the present performance of the students, the system classifies the students into different levels and identify the students at high risk. Earlier prediction can help the students to adopt suitable measures in advance to improve the per for- man ce. The systems can also identify the factor saffecting the performance of the same students which helps them to take remedial measures in advance.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moohanad Jawthari ◽  
Veronika Stoffová

AbstractThe target (dependent) variable is often influenced not only by ratio scale variables, but also by qualitative (nominal scale) variables in classification analysis. Majority of machine learning techniques accept only numerical inputs. Hence, it is necessary to encode these categorical variables into numerical values using encoding techniques. If the variable does not have relation or order between its values, assigning numbers will mislead the machine learning techniques. This paper presents a modified k-nearest-neighbors algorithm that calculates the distances values of categorical (nominal) variables without encoding them. A student’s academic performance dataset is used for testing the enhanced algorithm. It shows that the proposed algorithm outperforms standard one that needs nominal variables encoding to calculate the distance between the nominal variables. The results show the proposed algorithm preforms 14% better than standard one in accuracy, and it is not sensitive to outliers.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (5) ◽  
pp. 8-15
Author(s):  
Radwan Qasrawi ◽  
Stephanny VicunaPolo ◽  
Diala Abu Al-Halawa ◽  
Sameh Hallaq ◽  
Ziad Abdeen

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