50,510 research outputs found
The Potential for Student Performance Prediction in Small Cohorts with Minimal Available Attributes
The measurement of student performance during their progress through university study provides academic leadership with critical information on each student’s likelihood of success. Academics have traditionally used their interactions with individual students through class activities and interim assessments to identify those “at risk” of failure/withdrawal. However, modern university environments, offering easy on-line availability of course material, may see reduced lecture/tutorial attendance, making such identification more challenging. Modern data mining and machine learning techniques provide increasingly accurate predictions of student examination assessment marks, although these approaches have focussed upon large student populations and wide ranges of data attributes per student. However, many university modules comprise relatively small student cohorts, with institutional protocols limiting the student attributes available for analysis. It appears that very little research attention has been devoted to this area of analysis and prediction. We describe an experiment conducted on a final-year university module student cohort of 23, where individual student data are limited to lecture/tutorial attendance, virtual learning environment accesses and intermediate assessments. We found potential for predicting individual student interim and final assessment marks in small student cohorts with very limited attributes and that these predictions could be useful to support module leaders in identifying students potentially “at risk.”.Peer reviewe
From Review to Rating: Exploring Dependency Measures for Text Classification
Various text analysis techniques exist, which attempt to uncover unstructured
information from text. In this work, we explore using statistical dependence
measures for textual classification, representing text as word vectors. Student
satisfaction scores on a 3-point scale and their free text comments written
about university subjects are used as the dataset. We have compared two textual
representations: a frequency word representation and term frequency
relationship to word vectors, and found that word vectors provide a greater
accuracy. However, these word vectors have a large number of features which
aggravates the burden of computational complexity. Thus, we explored using a
non-linear dependency measure for feature selection by maximizing the
dependence between the text reviews and corresponding scores. Our quantitative
and qualitative analysis on a student satisfaction dataset shows that our
approach achieves comparable accuracy to the full feature vector, while being
an order of magnitude faster in testing. These text analysis and feature
reduction techniques can be used for other textual data applications such as
sentiment analysis.Comment: 8 page
A Multi Hidden Recurrent Neural Network with a Modified Grey Wolf Optimizer
Identifying university students' weaknesses results in better learning and
can function as an early warning system to enable students to improve. However,
the satisfaction level of existing systems is not promising. New and dynamic
hybrid systems are needed to imitate this mechanism. A hybrid system (a
modified Recurrent Neural Network with an adapted Grey Wolf Optimizer) is used
to forecast students' outcomes. This proposed system would improve instruction
by the faculty and enhance the students' learning experiences. The results show
that a modified recurrent neural network with an adapted Grey Wolf Optimizer
has the best accuracy when compared with other models.Comment: 34 pages, published in PLoS ON
- …