Educational Data Mining (EDM) is a developing discipline, concerned with expanding the classical Data Mining (DM) methods and developing new methods for discovering the data that originate from educational systems. It aims to use those methods to achieve a logical understanding of students, and the educational environment they should have for better learning. These data are characterized by their large size and randomness and this can make it difficult for educators to extract knowledge from these data. Additionally, knowledge extracted from data by means of counting the occurrence of certain events is not always reliable, since the counting process sometimes does not take into consideration other factors and parameters that could affect the extracted knowledge. Student attendance in Higher Education has always been dealt with in a classical way, i.e. educators rely on counting the occurrence of attendance or absence building their knowledge about students as well as modules based on this count. This method is neither credible nor does it necessarily provide a real indication of a student s performance. On other hand, the choice of an effective student assessment method is an issue of interest in Higher Education. Various studies (Romero, et al., 2010) have shown that students tend to get higher marks when assessed through coursework-based assessment methods - which include either modules that are fully assessed through coursework or a mixture of coursework and examinations than assessed by examination alone. There are a large number of Educational Data Mining (EDM) studies that pre-processed data through the conventional Data Mining processes including the data preparation process, but they are using transcript data as it stands without looking at examination and coursework results weighting which could affect prediction accuracy. This thesis explores the above problems and tries to formulate the extracted knowledge in a way that guarantees achieving accurate and credible results. Student attendance data, gathered from the educational system, were first cleaned in order to remove any randomness and noise, then various attributes were studied so as to highlight the most significant ones that affect the real attendance of students. The next step was to derive an equation that measures the Student Attendance s Credibility (SAC) considering the attributes chosen in the previous step. The reliability of the newly developed measure was then evaluated in order to examine its consistency. In term of transcripts data, this thesis proposes a different data preparation process through investigating more than 230,000 student records in order to prepare students marks based on the assessment methods of enrolled modules. The data have been processed through different stages in order to extract a categorical factor through which students module marks are refined during the data preparation process. The results of this work show that students final marks should not be isolated from the nature of the enrolled module s assessment methods; rather they must be investigated thoroughly and considered during EDM s data pre-processing phases. More generally, it is concluded that Educational Data should not be prepared in the same way as exist data due to the differences such as sources of data, applications, and types of errors in them. Therefore, an attribute, Coursework Assessment Ratio (CAR), is proposed to use in order to take the different modules assessment methods into account while preparing student transcript data. The effect of CAR and SAC on prediction process using data mining classification techniques such as Random Forest, Artificial Neural Networks and k-Nears Neighbors have been investigated. The results were generated by applying the DM techniques on our data set and evaluated by measuring the statistical differences between Classification Accuracy (CA) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of all models. Comprehensive evaluation has been carried out for all results in the experiments to compare all DM techniques results, and it has been found that Random forest (RF) has the highest CA and lowest RMSE. The importance of SAC and CAR in increasing the prediction accuracy has been proved in Chapter 5. Finally, the results have been compared with previous studies that predicted students final marks, based on students marks at earlier stages of their study. The comparisons have taken into consideration similar data and attributes, whilst first excluding average CAR and SAC and secondly by including them, and then measuring the prediction accuracy between both. The aim of this comparison is to ensure that the new preparation process stage will positively affect the final results.

Classroom instruction time is a valuable yet scarce resource to teachers, who must decide how to best meet their objectives by selecting which topics to spend time on and when to move forward. Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) are a powerful tool for teachers in this regard, allowing them to measure their students' current level of knowledge, helping them gauge student knowledge acquisition, and providing them with valuable insight into learning methodologies. By using ITS to identify the effectiveness of proven methods of instruction, we can more effectively teach students both in and outside of the classroom. In this paper we review the results and contributions of a new Bayesian data mining method which can be used to identify what works in an ITS and how it can be used to learn from data which is not in the typical randomized controlled trial design. We then discuss modifications to this dataset which use more knowledge about the students to improve accuracy. Lastly we evaluate this model on detecting and predicting long term student retention, and discuss methods to improve its predictive accuracy.

Using rich data collected from e-learning systems, it may be possible to build up just in time dynamic learner models to analyze learners' behaviours and to evaluate learners' performance in online education systems. The goal is to create metrics to measure learners' characteristics from usage data. To achieve this goal we need to use data mining methods, especially clustering algorithms, to find patterns from which metrics can be derived from usage data. In this thesis, we propose a six layer model (raw data layer, fact data layer, data mining layer, measurement layer, metric layer and pedagogical application layer) to create a just in time learner model which draws inferences from usage data. In this approach, we collect raw data from online systems, filter fact data from raw data, and then use clustering mining methods to create measurements and metrics.<p> In a pilot study, we used usage data collected from the iHelp system to create measurements and metrics to observe learners' behaviours in a real online system. The measurements and metrics relate to a learner's sociability, activity levels, learning styles, and knowledge levels. To validate the approach we designed two experiments to compare the metrics and measurements extracted from the iHelp system: expert evaluations and learner self evaluations. Even though the experiments did not produce statistically significant results, this approach shows promise to describe learners' behaviours through dynamically generated measurements and metric. Continued research on these kinds of methodologies is promising.

Using rich data collected from e-learning systems, it may be possible to build up just in time dynamic learner models to analyze learners' behaviours and to evaluate learners' performance in online education systems. The goal is to create metrics to measure learners' characteristics from usage data. To achieve this goal we need to use data mining methods, especially clustering algorithms, to find patterns from which metrics can be derived from usage data. In this thesis, we propose a six layer model (raw data layer, fact data layer, data mining layer, measurement layer, metric layer and pedagogical application layer) to create a just in time learner model which draws inferences from usage data. In this approach, we collect raw data from online systems, filter fact data from raw data, and then use clustering mining methods to create measurements and metrics.<p> In a pilot study, we used usage data collected from the iHelp system to create measurements and metrics to observe learners' behaviours in a real online system. The measurements and metrics relate to a learner's sociability, activity levels, learning styles, and knowledge levels. To validate the approach we designed two experiments to compare the metrics and measurements extracted from the iHelp system: expert evaluations and learner self evaluations. Even though the experiments did not produce statistically significant results, this approach shows promise to describe learners' behaviours through dynamically generated measurements and metric. Continued research on these kinds of methodologies is promising.

"Intelligent tutoring systems rely on student modeling to understand student behavior. The result of student modeling can provide assessment for student knowledge, estimation of student¡¯s current affective states (ie boredom, confusion, concentration, frustration, etc), prediction of student performance, and suggestion of the next tutoring steps. There are three focuses of this dissertation. The first focus is on better predicting student performance by adding more information, such as student identity and information about how many assistance students needed. The second focus is to analyze different performance and feature set for modeling student short-term knowledge and longer-term knowledge. The third focus is on improving the affect detectors by adding more features. In this dissertation I make contributions to the field of data mining as well as educational research. I demonstrate novel Bayesian networks for student modeling, and also compared them with each other. This work contributes to educational research by broadening the task of analyzing student knowledge to student knowledge retention, which is a much more important and interesting question for researchers to look at. Additionally, I showed a set of new useful features as well as how to effectively use these features in real models. For instance, in Chapter 5, I showed that the feature of the number of different days a students has worked on a skill is a more predictive feature for knowledge retention. These features themselves are not a contribution to data mining so much as they are to education research more broadly, which can used by other educational researchers or tutoring systems. "

ASSISTments is a web-based intelligent tutoring system that can provide students with immediate feedback when they are doing math homework. Until now, ASSISTments required internet access in order to do nightly homework. Without ASSISTments, students do their work on paper and are not told if they are correct or given help for wrong answers until the next morning at best. We've developed a component that supports 'offline-mode', enabling students without internet access at home to still receive immediate feedback on their responses. Students with laptops download their assignments at school, and then run ASSISTments at home in offline mode, utilizing the browser's application cache and Web Storage API. To evaluate the benefit of having the offline feature, we ran a randomized controlled study that tests the effect of immediate feedback on student learning. Intuition would suggest that providing a student with tutoring and feedback immediately after they submit an answer would lead to better understanding of the material than having them wait until the next day. The results of the study confirmed our hypothesis, and validated the need for 'offline mode.'

abstract: Reading comprehension is a critical aspect of life in America, but many English language learners struggle with this skill. Enhanced Moved by Reading to Accelerate Comprehension in English (EMBRACE) is a tablet-based interactive learning environment is designed to improve reading comprehension. During use of EMBRACE, all interactions with the system are logged, including correct and incorrect behaviors and help requests. These interactions could potentially be used to predict the child’s reading comprehension, providing an online measure of understanding. In addition, time-related features have been used for predicting learning by educational data mining models in mathematics and science, and may be relevant in this context. This project investigated the predictive value of data mining models based on user actions for reading comprehension, with and without timing information. Contradictory results of the investigation were obtained. The KNN and SVM models indicated that elapsed time is an important feature, but the linear regression models indicated that elapsed time is not an important feature. Finally, a new statistical test was performed on the KNN algorithm which indicated that the feature selection process may have caused overfitting, where features were chosen due coincidental alignment with the participants’ performance. These results provide important insights which will aid in the development of a reading comprehension predictor that improves the EMBRACE system’s ability to better serve ELLs. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Computer Science 2017

Com a popularização do uso de recursos tecnológicos na educação, uma enorme quantidade de dados, relacionados às interações entre alunos e esses recursos, é armazenada. Analisar esses dados, visando caracterizar os alunos, é tarefa muito importante, uma vez que os resultados dessa análise podem auxiliar professores no processo de ensino e aprendizagem. Entretanto, devido ao fato de as ferramentas utilizadas para essa caracterização serem complexas e pouco intuitivas, os profissionais da área de ensino acabam por não utilizá-las, inviabilizando a implementação de tais ferramentas em ambientes educacionais. Dentro desse contexto, a dissertação de mestrado aqui apresentada teve como objetivo analisar os dados provenientes de um sistema tutor inteligente, o MathTutor, que disponibiliza exercícios específicos de matemática, para identificar padrões de comportamento dos alunos que interagiram com esse sistema durante um determinado período. Essa análise foi realizada por meio de um processo de Mineração de Dados Educacionais (EDM), utilizando a ferramenta DAMICORE, com o intuito de possibilitar que fossem geradas, de forma rápida e eficaz, informações úteis à caracterização dos alunos. Durante a realização dessa análise, seguiram-se algumas fases do processo de descobrimento de conhecimento em bases de dados, seleção, pré-processamento, mineração dos dados e avaliação e interpretação. Na fase de mineração de dados, foi utilizada a ferramenta DAMICORE, que encontrou padrões que foram estudados na fase de avaliação e interpretação. A partir dessa análise foram encontrados padrões comportamentais dos alunos, por exemplo, alunos do sexo masculino apresentam rendimento superior ou inferior ao de alunas do sexo feminino e quais alunos terão um bom ou mau rendimento nas etapas finais do processo de ensino. Como principal resultado temos que uma das hipóteses criadas, Alunos que obtiveram bom desempenho no pós-teste imediato apresentaram dois dos três seguintes comportamentos: poucas interações na intervenção, baixo tempo interagindo com o sistema na intervenção e poucos misconceptions no pré-teste, teve sua acurácia comprovada dentre os dados utilizados nessa pesquisa. Assim, por meio desta pesquisa concluiu-se que a utilização da DAMICORE em contexto educacional pode auxiliar o professor a inferir o desempenho dos seus alunos oferecendo a ele a oportunidade de realizar as intervenções pedagógicas que auxiliem alunos com possíveis dificuldades e apresente novos desafios para aqueles com facilidade no tema estudado / With the popularization of the use of technological resources in education, a huge amount of data, related to the interactions between students and these resources, is stored. Analyzing this data, due to characterize the students, is an important task, since the results of this analysis can help teachers on teaching and learning process. However, due to the fact that the tools used to this characterization are complex and non-intuitive, the educational professionals do not use it, invalidating the implementation of such tools at educational environments. Within this context, this master\'s dissertation aimed analyzing the prevenient data from an educational web system named MathTutor, which offers specific math exercises to identify behavioral patterns of students who interacted with this system during some period. This analysis was performed by a process known as Educational Data Mining, using the tool named DAMICORE, in order to enable quickly and effectively the construction of helpful information to the characterization of the students. During the course of this analysis, some phases of the process of knowledge discovery in databases were followed: \"selection\", \"preprocessing\", \"data mining\" and \"evaluation and interpretation\". In \"data mining\" phase, the tool DAMICORE was used to find behavioral patterns of students which were studied at the \"evaluation and interpretation\" phase. From this analysis, behavioral patterns of students were found, for example, male students have higher or lower yield against the female students and which students are going to have a good or bad yield on the final steps of the educational process. As the main result we have one of the made assumptions, \"Students who get good performance in the \"immediate posttest\" showed two of the following behaviors: few interactions in the \"intervention\", low time interacting with the system in the \"intervention\" and few misconceptions in \"pretest\"\", has proven its accuracy among the data used in this dissertation. Thus, through this research, it was concluded that the use of DAMICORE at educational context can help teacher to infer the performance of their students offering him the opportunity to perform the pedagogical interventions that help students who faces difficulties and show new challenges for those who have facilities in the subject studied.

In the field of Artificial Intelligence in Education, many contributions have been made toward estimating student proficiency in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (cf. Corbett & Anderson, 1995). Although the community is increasingly capable of estimating how much a student knows, this does not shed much light on when the knowledge was acquired. In recent research (Baker, Goldstein, & Heffernan, 2010), we created a model that attempts to answer that exact question. We call the model P(J), for the probability that a student just learned from the last problem they answered. We demonstrated an analysis of changes in P(J) that we call “spikiness", defined as the maximum value of P(J) for a student/knowledge component (KC) pair, divided by the average value of P(J) for that same student/KC pair. Spikiness is directly correlated with final student knowledge, meaning that spikes can be an early predictor of success. It has been shown that both over-practice and under-practice can be detrimental to student learning, so using this model can potentially help bias tutors toward ideal practice schedules. After demonstrating the validity of the P(J) model in both CMU's Cognitive Tutor and WPI's ASSISTments Tutoring System, we conducted a pilot study to test the utility of our model. The experiment included a balanced pre/post-test and three conditions for proficiency assessment tested across 6 knowledge components. In the first condition, students are considered to have mastered a KC after correctly answering 3 questions in a row. The second condition uses Bayesian Knowledge Tracing and accepts a student as proficient once they earn a current knowledge probability (Ln) of 0.95 or higher. Finally, we test P(J), which accepts mastery if a student's P(J) value spikes from one problem and the next first response is correct. In this work, we will discuss the details of deriving P(J), our experiment and its results, as well as potential ways this model could be utilized to improve the effectiveness of cognitive mastery learning.

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) have been proven to be efficient in providing students assistance and assessing their performance when they do their homework. Many research projects have been done to analyze how students' knowledge grows and to predict their performance from within intelligent tutoring system. Most of them focus on using correctness of the previous question or the number of hints and attempts students need to predict their future performance, but ignore how they ask for hints and make attempts. In this research work, we build a Sequence of Actions (SOA) model taking advantage of the sequence of hints and attempts a student needed for previous question to predict students' performance. A two step modeling methodology is put forward in the work, which is a combination of Tabling method and the Logistic Regression. We used an ASSISTments dataset of 66 students answering a total of 34,973 problems generated from 5010 questions over the course of two years. The experimental results showed that the Sequence of Action model has reliable predictive accuracy than Knowledge Tracing and Assistance Model and its performance of prediction is improved after combining with Knowledge Tracing.