The large rates of students' failure is a very frequent problem in undergraduate courses, being even more evident in exact sciences. Pointing out the reasons of such problem is a paramount research topic, though not an easy task. An alternative is to use Educational Data Mining techniques (EDM), which enables one to convert data from educational…

This paper introduces a novel approach to identify at-risk students with a focus on output interpretability through analyzing learning activities at a finer granularity on a weekly basis. Specifically, this approach converts the predicted output from the former weeks into meaningful probabilities to infer the predictions in the current week for…

Introduction: The concept and study of relevance has been a central subject in information science. Although research in information retrieval has been focused on topical relevance, other kinds of relevance are also important and justify further study. Motivational relevance is typically inferred by criteria such as user satisfaction and success.…

Data mining has been successfully used by financial and retail companies since the mid-1960's to create predictive models and reveal unexpected relationships. However, it remains underutilized as a tool in educational research. Large-scale standardized assessment programs such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)…

The purpose of this study is to examine different formats of comment data to predict student performance. Having students write comment data after every lesson can reflect students' learning attitudes, tendencies and learning activities involved with the lesson. In this research, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Probabilistic Latent Semantic…

How should a wide variety of educational activities be sequenced to maximize student learning? Although some experimental studies have addressed this question, educational data mining methods may be able to evaluate a wider range of possibilities and better handle many simultaneous sequencing constraints. We introduce Sequencing Constraint…

The purpose of this article is to identify the order of significance of the variables that affect science and mathematics achievement in middle school students. For this aim, the study deals with the relationship between science and math in terms of different angles using the perspectives of multiple causes-single effect and of multiple…

The performance of information retrieval systems varies significantly by test topics. Even for those systems that have performed well on average, the results for some difficult topics are still poor. Previous studies have revealed that different optimization techniques should be used for those difficult topics. However, a prerequisite of the…

The purpose of this article is to identify the order of significance of the variables that affect science and mathematics achievement in middle school students. For this aim, the study deals with the relationship between science and math in terms of different angles using the perspectives of multiple causes-single effect and of multiple…

In the past few years, universities have become much more involved in outcomes assessment. Outside of the classroom analysis of learning outcomes, an investigation is performed into the use of current data mining tools to assess the issue of student retention within the Computer Information Systems (CIS) department. Utilizing both a historical…

Argues that, given a document and a query, users first judge the document against the individual concepts in the query and then use some inferencing process to derive a compound judgment for the entire query. The research examines the relative effectiveness of probabilistic and fuzzy models at predicting users' compound judgments. (23 references)…

Explores the relationship between the concept of uncertainty in information seeking within a model of the problem-solving process and variables derived from other models, based on longitudinal data collected in the United Sates and the United Kingdom that investigated the processes of mediated information retrieval searching during human…

The 12th iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2019) is organized under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society in Montreal, Canada. The theme of this year's conference is EDM in Open-Ended Domains. As EDM has matured it has increasingly been applied to open-ended and ill-defined tasks…

Reports on a study of user-based relevance interpretations which considered the nature of users' thought processes in evaluating bibliographic citations produced by a document retrieval system. Factors found to be important include an individual's subject knowledge, professional training, educational background, anticipated usage of documents,…

Describes preliminary results of a study that examined the effect of individual differences on the use of CD-ROM databases by novice undergraduate users. Factors considered include age, sex, native language, major, computer literacy, computer affinity, personality traits, learning style, visual ability, and perceived usefulness of the system. A…