We analyze learning data of an e-assessment platform for an introductory mathematical statistics course, more specifically the time of the day when students learn. We propose statistical models to predict students' success and to describe their behavior with a special focus on the following aspects. First, we find that learning during daytime and not at nighttime is a relevant variable for predicting success in final exams. Second, we observe that good and very good students tend to learn in the afternoon, while some students who failed our course were more likely to study at night but not successfully so. Third, we discuss the average time spent on exercises. Regarding this, students who participated in an exam spent more time doing exercises than students who dropped the course before.
@cite_0: Predicting student's performance is a challenging, yet complicated task for institutions, instructors and learners. Accurate predictions of performance could lead to improved learning outcomes and increased goal achievement. In this paper we explore the predictive capabilities of student's time-spent on answering (in-)correctly each question of a multiple-choice assessment quiz, along with student's final quiz-score, in the context of computer-based testing. We also explore the correlation between the time-spent factor (as defined here) and goal-expectancy. We present a case study and investigate the value of using this parameter as a learning analytics factor for improving prediction of performance during computer-based testing. Our initial results are encouraging and indicate that the temporal dimension of learning analytics should be further explored.
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@cite_4: We develop early warning systems to predict at-risk students while a course is in progress.Learning portfolios from a fully online course are evaluated by data mining techniques.The results show that CART supplemented by AdaBoost has the best classification performance.Time-dependent variables are essential to identify student online learning performance. An early warning system can help to identify at-risk students, or predict student learning performance by analyzing learning portfolios recorded in a learning management system (LMS). Although previous studies have shown the applicability of determining learner behaviors from an LMS, most investigated datasets are not assembled from online learning courses or from whole learning activities undertaken on courses that can be analyzed to evaluate students' academic achievement. Previous studies generally focus on the construction of predictors for learner performance evaluation after a course has ended, and neglect the practical value of an "early warning" system to predict at-risk students while a course is in progress. We collected the complete learning activities of an online undergraduate course and applied data-mining techniques to develop an early warning system. Our results showed that, time-dependent variables extracted from LMS are critical factors for online learning. After students have used an LMS for a period of time, our early warning system effectively characterizes their current learning performance. Data-mining techniques are useful in the construction of early warning systems; based on our experimental results, classification and regression tree (CART), supplemented by AdaBoost is the best classifier for the evaluation of learning performance investigated by this study.
@cite_10: Differences in learners' behavior have a deep impact on their educational performance. Consequently, there is a need to detect and identify these differences and build suitable learner models accordingly. In this paper, we report on the results from an alternative approach for dynamic student behavioral modeling based on the analysis of time-based student-generated trace data. The goal was to unobtrusively classify students according to their time-spent behavior. We applied 5 different supervised learning classification algorithms on these data, using as target values (class labels) the students' performance score classes during a Computer-Based Assessment (CBA) process, and compared the obtained results. The proposed approach has been explored in a study with 259 undergraduate university participant students. The analysis of the findings revealed that a) the low misclassification rates are indicative of the accuracy of the applied method and b) the ensemble learning (treeBagger) method provides better classification results compared to the others. These preliminary results are encouraging, indicating that a time-spent driven description of the students' behavior could have an added value towards dynamically reshaping the respective models.
In contrast to previous studies which mostly rely on quantitative and qualitative learning activity measured by time-invariant variables, there is also a temporal dimension of engagement which has been studied from different perspectives throughout the academic literature. @cite_4 use time-dependent information provided by a learning management system to predict academic performance. @cite_5 incorporate students' response time as an additional feature into a random forest to investigate the predictive capability for students' performance and find evidence that it can indeed improve prediction accuracy. @cite_0 and @cite_10 further elaborate on the latter by using more sophisticated techniques and are able to support the preceding result.