HUDSON F. GOLINO, & CRISTIANO MAURO A. GOMES
Resumo
The present study investigates the prediction of academic achievement (high vs. low) through four machine learning models (learning trees, bagging, Random Forest and Boosting) using several psychological and educational tests and scales in the following domains: intelligence, metacognition, basic educational background, learning approaches and basic cognitive processing. The sample was composed by 77 college students (55% woman) enrolled in the 2nd and 3rd year of a private Medical School from the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The sample was randomly split into training and testing set for cross validation. In the training set the prediction total accuracy ranged from of 65% (bagging model) to 92.50% (boosting model), while the sensitivity ranged from 57.90% (learning tree) to 90% (boosting model) and the specificity ranged from 66.70% (bagging model) to 95% (boosting model). The difference between the predictive performance of each model in training set and in the testing set varied from – 2.60% to 23.10% in terms of the total accuracy, from -5.60% to 27.50% in the sensitivity index and from 0% to 20% in terms of specificity, for the bagging and the boosting models respectively. This result shows that these machine learning models can be used to achieve high accurate predictions of academic achievement, but the difference in the predictive performance from the training set to the test set indicates that some models are more stable than the others in terms of predictive performance (total accuracy, sensitivity and specificity). The advantages of the tree-based machine learning models in the prediction of academic achievement will be presented and discussed throughout the paper.
Palavras-Chave
Higher Education; Machine Learning; academic achievement; prediction.
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