A state‐of‐the‐art survey of predicting students' performance using artificial neural networks

Abstract

AbstractPredicting students' performance is one of the most important issue in educational data mining. In order to investigate the state‐of‐the‐art research development in predicting students' performance by using artificial neural networks (ANN), we conducted a survey on 39 important studies on this issue from 2016 to 2021. The results show that: (1) objectives of most prediction model is the performance of learners on the program and course; (2) datasets used for training prediction model are collected from logs of the learning management system; (3) the most commonly used ANN is feedforward neural network; (4) researchers use stochastic gradient descent and Adam algorithm to optimizes the parameters in ANN and configure hyper parameters of ANN manually; (5) feature selection is not necessary because ANN can automatically adjust the weights of artificial neurons; and (6) ANN has better performance than the classical classifiers in predicting student performance. The challenges in previous studies were comprehensively analyzed, suggestions for future research were put forward.