Using data mining to predict secondary school student performance

Although the educational level of the Portuguese population has improved in the last decades, the statistics keep Portugal at Europe’s tail end due to its high student failure rates. In particular, lack of success in the core classes of Mathematics and the Portuguese language is extremely serious. On the other hand, the fields of Business Intelligence (BI)/Data Mining (DM), which aim at extracting high-level knowledge from raw data, offer interesting automated tools that can aid the education domain. The present work intends to approach student achievement in secondary education using BI/DM techniques. Recent real-world data (e.g. student grades, demographic, social and school related features) was collected by using school reports and questionnaires. The two core classes (i.e. Mathematics and Portuguese) were modeled under binary/five-level classification and regression tasks. Also, four DM models (i.e. Decision Trees, Random Forest, Neural Networks and Support Vector Machines) and three input selections (e.g. with and without previous grades) were tested. The results show that a good predictive accuracy can be achieved, provided that the first and/or second school period grades are available. Although student achievement is highly influenced by past evaluations, an explanatory analysis has shown that there are also other relevant features (e.g. number of absences, parent’s job and education, alcohol consumption). As a direct outcome of this research, more efficient student prediction tools can be be developed, improving the quality of education and enhancing school resource management.