Early prediction models and crucial factor extraction for first-year undergraduate student dropouts
JOURNAL OF APPLIED RESEARCH IN HIGHER EDUCATION(2024)
Abstract
PurposeThis study aimed to use enrollment information including demographic, family background and financial status, which can be gathered before the first semester starts, to construct early prediction models (EPMs) and extract crucial factors associated with first-year student dropout probability.Design/methodology/approachThe real-world samples comprised the enrolled records of 2,412 first-year students of a private university (UNI) in Taiwan. This work utilized decision trees (DT), multilayer perceptron (MLP) and logistic regression (LR) algorithms for constructing EPMs; under-sampling, random oversampling and synthetic minority over sampling technique (SMOTE) methods for solving data imbalance problems; accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curve and area under ROC curve (AUC) for evaluating constructed EPMs.FindingsDT outperformed MLP and LR with accuracy (97.59%), precision (98%), recall (97%), F1_score (97%), and ROC-AUC (98%). The top-ranking factors comprised "student loan," "dad occupations," "mom educational level," "department," "mom occupations," "admission type," "school fee waiver" and "main sources of living."Practical implicationsThis work only used enrollment information to identify dropout students and crucial factors associated with dropout probability as soon as students enter universities. The extracted rules could be utilized to enhance student retention.Originality/valueAlthough first-year student dropouts have gained non-stop attention from researchers in educational practices and theories worldwide, diverse previous studies utilized while-and/or post-semester factors, and/or questionnaires for predicting. These methods failed to offer universities early warning systems (EWS) and/or assist them in providing in-time assistance to dropouts, who face economic difficulties. This work provided universities with an EWS and extracted rules for early dropout prevention and intervention.
MoreTranslated text
Key words
First-year undergraduate student dropouts,Early prediction models,Crucial factors for student dropouts,Student dropout prediction,Machine learning
AI Read Science
Must-Reading Tree
Example
![](https://originalfileserver.aminer.cn/sys/aminer/pubs/mrt_preview.jpeg)
Generate MRT to find the research sequence of this paper
Chat Paper
Summary is being generated by the instructions you defined