Evaluating the effectiveness of educational data mining techniques for early prediction of students' academic failure in introductory programming courses

The data about high students' failure rates in introductory programming courses have been alarming many educators, raising a number of important questions regarding prediction aspects. In this paper, we present a comparative study on the effectiveness of educational data mining techniques to early predict students likely to fail in introductory programming courses. Although several works have analyzed these techniques to identify students' academic failures, our study differs from existing ones as follows: (i) we investigate the effectiveness of such techniques to identify students likely to fail at early enough stage for action to be taken to reduce the failure rate; (ii) we analyse the impact of data preprocessing and algorithms fine-tuning tasks, on the effectiveness of the mentioned techniques. In our study we evaluated the effectiveness of four prediction techniques on two different and independent data sources on introductory programming courses available from a Brazilian Public University: one comes from distance education and the other from on-campus. The results showed that the techniques analyzed in our study are able to early identify students likely to fail, the effectiveness of some of these techniques is improved after applying the data preprocessing and/or algorithms fine-tuning, and the support vector machine technique outperforms the other ones in a statistically significant way. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.