Student Performance Prediction with Short-Term Sequential Campus Behaviors

Abstract

As students’ behaviors are important factors that can reflect their learning styles and living habits on campus, extracting useful features of them plays a helpful role in understanding the students’ learning process, which is an important step towards personalized education. Recently, the task of predicting students’ performance from their campus behaviors has aroused the researchers’ attention. However, existing studies mainly focus on extracting statistical features manually from the pre-stored data, resulting in hysteresis in predicting students’ achievement and finding out their problems. Furthermore, due to the limited representation capability of these manually extracted features, they can only understand the students’ behaviors shallowly. To make the prediction process timely and automatically, we treat the performance prediction task as a short-term sequence prediction problem, and propose a two-stage classification framework, i.e., Sequence-based Performance Classifier (SPC), which consists of a sequence encoder and a classic data mining classifier. More specifically, to deeply discover the sequential features from students’ campus behaviors, we first introduce an attention-based Hybrid Recurrent Neural Network (HRNN) to encode their recent behaviors by giving a higher weight to the ones that are related to the students’ last action. Then, to conduct student performance prediction, we further involve these learned features to the classic Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm and finally achieve our SPC model. We conduct extensive experiments in the real-world student card dataset. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method in terms of Accuracy and Recall.