Machine learning in Education

A special issue of Education Sciences (ISSN 2227-7102).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 November 2020) | Viewed by 2979

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Department of Computer Science, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA 23284, USA
Interests: data streams; concept drift; multi-label learning; imbalanced learning
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Machine learning and data mining have transformed the way students, educators, and institutions interact through intelligent systems to monitor and optimize student’s success. The ever-increasing amount of student data available in e-learning management systems allows one to track information about student activities, participation, and interactions in multiple courses. This allows one to resolve arising challenges in education, such as automatic course recommendations, predicting a student’s academic performance, detecting a student’s withdrawal from courses early, detecting a student’s dropout from the academic programs, and course activities optimization, among others. The flood of real-time and historical data help to identify patterns among students and facilitate educators regarding early intervention if a student is found in need of educational support. The ultimate goal of machine learning in education is to foster student success and increase graduation and retention rates. Nevertheless, these intelligent systems need to be fully supported by the educational institution, which is responsible for providing educators with the tools and resources necessary to intervene. The revolution of new online courses, and particularly massive open online courses (MOOCs), calls for new machine learning approaches that can resolve the new challenges of education in the 2020s. This Special Issue presents some of the most recent innovative research works in machine learning and data mining for education.

References

  • Baker, R.S.J.D., 2010. Data mining for education. International encyclopedia of education, 7(3), pp.112-118.
  • Siemens, G. and d Baker, R.S., 2012. Learning analytics and educational data mining: towards communication and collaboration. In Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on learning analytics and knowledge (pp. 252-254). ACM.
  • Romero, C. and Ventura, S., 2010. Educational data mining: a review of the state of the art. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C (Applications and Reviews), 40(6), pp.601-618.
  • Siemens, G. and d Baker, R.S., 2012. Learning analytics and educational data mining: towards communication and collaboration. In Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on learning analytics and knowledge (pp. 252-254). ACM.
  • Ferguson, R., 2012. Learning analytics: drivers, developments and challenges. International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning, 4(5/6), pp.304-317.
  • Romero, C. and Ventura, S., 2013. Data mining in education. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 3(1), pp.12-27.
  • Baker, R.S. and Inventado, P.S., 2014. Educational data mining and learning analytics. In Learning analytics (pp. 61-75). Springer, New York, NY.
  • Ciolacu, M., Tehrani, A.F., Beer, R. and Popp, H., 2017. Education 4.0—Fostering student's performance with machine learning methods. In 2017 IEEE 23rd International Symposium for Design and Technology in Electronic Packaging (SIITME) (pp. 438-443). IEEE.
  • Romero, C. and Ventura, S., 2017. Educational data science in massive open online courses. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 7(1), p.e1187.
  • Dutt, A., Ismail, M.A. and Herawan, T., 2017. A systematic review on educational data mining. IEEE Access, 5, pp.15991-16005.

Dr. Alberto Cano
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • Machine learning
  • Educational data science
  • Educational data mining
  • Learning analytics

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

18 pages, 1006 KiB  
Article
Improving Graduation Rate Estimates Using Regularly Updating Multi-Level Absorbing Markov Chains
by Shahab Boumi and Adan Ernesto Vela
Educ. Sci. 2020, 10(12), 377; https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci10120377 - 13 Dec 2020
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 2339
Abstract
American universities use a procedure based on a rolling six-year graduation rate to calculate statistics regarding their students’ final educational outcomes (graduating or not graduating). As an alternative to the six-year graduation rate method, many studies have applied absorbing Markov chains for estimating [...] Read more.
American universities use a procedure based on a rolling six-year graduation rate to calculate statistics regarding their students’ final educational outcomes (graduating or not graduating). As an alternative to the six-year graduation rate method, many studies have applied absorbing Markov chains for estimating graduation rates. In both cases, a frequentist approach is used. For the standard six-year graduation rate method, the frequentist approach corresponds to counting the number of students who finished their program within six years and dividing by the number of students who entered that year. In the case of absorbing Markov chains, the frequentist approach is used to compute the underlying transition matrix, which is then used to estimate the graduation rate. In this paper, we apply a sensitivity analysis to compare the performance of the standard six-year graduation rate method with that of absorbing Markov chains. Through the analysis, we highlight significant limitations with regards to the estimation accuracy of both approaches when applied to small sample sizes or cohorts at a university. Additionally, we note that the Absorbing Markov chain method introduces a significant bias, which leads to an underestimation of the true graduation rate. To overcome both these challenges, we propose and evaluate the use of a regularly updating multi-level absorbing Markov chain (RUML-AMC) in which the transition matrix is updated year to year. We empirically demonstrate that the proposed RUML-AMC approach nearly eliminates estimation bias while reducing the estimation variation by more than 40%, especially for populations with small sample sizes. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Machine learning in Education)
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