Artificial neural network model to predict student performance using nonpersonal information

Abstract

In recent years, artificial intelligence has played an important role in education, wherein one of the most commonly used applications is forecasting students’ academic performance based on personal information such as social status, income, address, etc. This study proposes and develops an artificial neural network model capable of determining whether a student will pass a certain class without using personal or sensitive information that may compromise student privacy. For model training, we used information regarding 32,000 students collected from The Open University of the United Kingdom, such as number of times they took the course, average number of evaluations, course pass rate, average use of virtual materials per date and number of clicks in virtual classrooms. Attributes selected for the model are as follows: 93.81% accuracy, 94.15% precision, 95.13% recall, and 94.64% F1-score. These results will help the student authorities to take measures to avoid withdrawal and underachievement.