ERIC Number: EJ1199908
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2018
Pages: 18
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: EISSN-1929-7750
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Learn from Your (Markov) Neighbour: Co-Enrollment, Assortativity, and Grade Prediction in Undergraduate Courses
Gardner, Josh; Brooks, Christopher; Li, Warren
Journal of Learning Analytics, v5 n3 p42-59 2018
In this paper, we evaluate the complete undergraduate co-enrollment network over a decade of education at a large American public university. We provide descriptive and exploratory analyses of the network, demonstrating that the co-enrollment networks evaluated follow power-law degree distributions similar to many other large-scale networks; that they reveal strong performance-based assortativity; and that network-based features can improve GPA-based student performance predictors. We model the university-wide undergraduate co-enrollment network as an undirected graph, and implement multiple network-augmented approaches to student grade prediction, including an adaption of the structural modelling approach from (Getoor, 2005; Lu & Getoor, 2003a). We compare the performance of this predictor to traditional methods used for grade prediction in undergraduate university courses, and demonstrate that a multi-view ensembling approach outperforms both prior "flat" and network-based models for grade prediction across several classification metrics. These findings demonstrate the usefulness of combining diverse approaches in models of student success, and demonstrate specific network-based modelling strategies that are likely to be most effective for grade prediction.
Descriptors: Markov Processes, Classification, Undergraduate Students, Grade Point Average, State Universities, Longitudinal Studies, Networks, Predictor Variables, Comparative Analysis, Academic Achievement, Models, Enrollment, Network Analysis
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
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Language: English
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