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Predicting Master’s students’ academic performance: an empirical study in Germany
The tremendous growth in electronic educational data creates the need to have meaningful information extracted from it. Educational Data Mining (EDM) is an exciting research area that can reveal valuable knowledge from educational databases. This knowledge can be used for many purposes, including id...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Springer Nature Singapore
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9786516/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40561-022-00220-y |
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author | Alturki, Sarah Cohausz, Lea Stuckenschmidt, Heiner |
author_facet | Alturki, Sarah Cohausz, Lea Stuckenschmidt, Heiner |
author_sort | Alturki, Sarah |
collection | PubMed |
description | The tremendous growth in electronic educational data creates the need to have meaningful information extracted from it. Educational Data Mining (EDM) is an exciting research area that can reveal valuable knowledge from educational databases. This knowledge can be used for many purposes, including identifying dropouts or weak students who need special attention and discovering extraordinary students who can be offered lifetime opportunities. Although former studies in EDM used an extensive range of features for predicting students’ academic achievement (in terms of (i) achieved grades or (ii) passing and failing), those features are sometimes not obtainable for practical usage, and therefore, the prediction models are not feasible for employment. This study uses data mining (DM) algorithms to predict the academic performance of master’ s students by using a non-extensive data set and including only the features that are easy to collect at the beginning of a studying program. To perform this study, we have collected over 700 students' records from 2010 to 2018 from the Faculty of Business Informatics and Mathematics at the University of Mannheim in Germany. Those records include demographics and post-enrollment features such as semester grades. The empirical results show the following: (i) the most significant features for predicting students' academic achievements are the students’ grades in each semester (importance rate between 14 and 36%), followed by the distance from students’ accommodation to university (importance rate between 6 and 18%) and culture (importance rate between 7 and 17%). On the other hand, gender, age, the numbers of failed courses, and the number of registered and unregistered exams per semester are less significant for the predictions. (ii) As expected, predictions performed after the second semester is more accurate than those performed after the first semester. (iii) Unsurprisingly, models that predict two classes yield better results than those that predict three. (iv) Random Forest classifier performs the best in all prediction models (0.77–0.94 accuracy), and using oversampling methods to deal with imbalanced data can significantly improve the performance of DM methods. For future work, we recommend testing the predictive models on other master programs and a larger datasets. Furthermore, we recommend investigating other oversampling approaches. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9786516 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Springer Nature Singapore |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-97865162022-12-27 Predicting Master’s students’ academic performance: an empirical study in Germany Alturki, Sarah Cohausz, Lea Stuckenschmidt, Heiner Smart Learn. Environ. Research The tremendous growth in electronic educational data creates the need to have meaningful information extracted from it. Educational Data Mining (EDM) is an exciting research area that can reveal valuable knowledge from educational databases. This knowledge can be used for many purposes, including identifying dropouts or weak students who need special attention and discovering extraordinary students who can be offered lifetime opportunities. Although former studies in EDM used an extensive range of features for predicting students’ academic achievement (in terms of (i) achieved grades or (ii) passing and failing), those features are sometimes not obtainable for practical usage, and therefore, the prediction models are not feasible for employment. This study uses data mining (DM) algorithms to predict the academic performance of master’ s students by using a non-extensive data set and including only the features that are easy to collect at the beginning of a studying program. To perform this study, we have collected over 700 students' records from 2010 to 2018 from the Faculty of Business Informatics and Mathematics at the University of Mannheim in Germany. Those records include demographics and post-enrollment features such as semester grades. The empirical results show the following: (i) the most significant features for predicting students' academic achievements are the students’ grades in each semester (importance rate between 14 and 36%), followed by the distance from students’ accommodation to university (importance rate between 6 and 18%) and culture (importance rate between 7 and 17%). On the other hand, gender, age, the numbers of failed courses, and the number of registered and unregistered exams per semester are less significant for the predictions. (ii) As expected, predictions performed after the second semester is more accurate than those performed after the first semester. (iii) Unsurprisingly, models that predict two classes yield better results than those that predict three. (iv) Random Forest classifier performs the best in all prediction models (0.77–0.94 accuracy), and using oversampling methods to deal with imbalanced data can significantly improve the performance of DM methods. For future work, we recommend testing the predictive models on other master programs and a larger datasets. Furthermore, we recommend investigating other oversampling approaches. Springer Nature Singapore 2022-12-23 2022 /pmc/articles/PMC9786516/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40561-022-00220-y Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . |
spellingShingle | Research Alturki, Sarah Cohausz, Lea Stuckenschmidt, Heiner Predicting Master’s students’ academic performance: an empirical study in Germany |
title | Predicting Master’s students’ academic performance: an empirical study in Germany |
title_full | Predicting Master’s students’ academic performance: an empirical study in Germany |
title_fullStr | Predicting Master’s students’ academic performance: an empirical study in Germany |
title_full_unstemmed | Predicting Master’s students’ academic performance: an empirical study in Germany |
title_short | Predicting Master’s students’ academic performance: an empirical study in Germany |
title_sort | predicting master’s students’ academic performance: an empirical study in germany |
topic | Research |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9786516/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40561-022-00220-y |
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