Estimation of Student Performance by Considering Consecutive Lessons

Examining student learning behavior is one of the crucial educational issues. In this paper, we propose a new method to predict student performance by using comment data mining. A teacher just asks students after every lesson to freely describe and write about their learning situations, attitudes, tendencies, and behaviors. The method employs Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) to predict student grades in each lesson. In order to obtain further improvement of prediction results, we apply a majority vote method to the predicted results obtained in consecutive lessons to keep track of each student's learning situation. Also, we evaluate the reliability of the predicted student grades to know when we can rely prediction results of student grade during the period of the semester. The experiment results show that our proposed method continuously tracked student learning situation and improved prediction performance of final student grades compared to Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) and Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) models. Also, considering the differences of prediction results in the two consecutive lessons helps to evaluate the reliability of the predicted results.