Predicting Academic Performance: A Systematic Literature Review

The ability to predict student performance in a course or program creates opportunities to improve educational outcomes. With effective performance prediction approaches, instructors can allocate resources and instruction more accurately. Research in this area seeks to identify features that can be used to make predictions, to identify algorithms that can improve predictions, and to quantify aspects of student performance. Moreover, research in predicting student performance seeks to determine interrelated features and to identify the underlying reasons why certain features work better than others. This working group report presents a systematic literature review of work in the area of predicting student performance. Our analysis shows a clearly increasing amount of research in this area, as well as an increasing variety of techniques used. At the same time, the review uncovered a number of issues with research quality that drives a need for the community to provide more detailed reporting of methods and results and to increase efforts to validate and replicate work.Peer reviewe

Module Advisor: A Hybrid Recommender System for Elective Module Exploration

The 12th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys '18), Vancouver, Canada, 2 October 2018Recommender systems are omni-present in our every day lives, guiding us through the vast amount of information available. However, in the academic world, personalised recommendations are less prominent, leaving students to navigate through the typically large space of available courses and modules manually. Since it is crucial for students to make informed choices about their learning pathways, we aim to improve the way students discover elective modules by developing a hybrid recommender system prototype that is specifically designed to help students find elective modules from a diverse set of subjects. We can improve the discoverability of long-tail options and help students broaden their horizons by combining notions of similarity and diversity.Science Foundation IrelandInsight Research Centr