Identify Students at Risk Based on Behavioural Patterns in Continuous Assessment

Students’ success is the ultimate goal of any institution around the world. Early detection of at-risk students can facilitate the instructor or tutor to provide timely support to those at risk of failing the course. In a traditional face-to-face classroom, students can monitor learning patterns in routine interactions. However, teachers in the online classroom have limited information, compared with the face-to-face classroom, to detect students in trouble due to the lack of instance interactions between teachers and students. Particularly, such a problem has become worse than ever since 2020, as online teaching and learning are ubiquitous in the Post-COVID19 Era. In this work, we aim to predict if the student obtains a low course grade based on their behavioral patterns in continuous assessments, which are easy-to-retrieve attributes and available in most e-learning systems. We leverage the ratio of assessment grade to the time spent on the assessment as a useful feature in the machine-learning prediction framework. Experiments on real-world datasets indicate that such a ratio can improve the accuracy of detecting at-risk students.