Improving academic performance predictions with dual graph neural networks

Abstract

Academic performance is a crucial issue in the field of Online learning analytics. While deep learning-based models have made significant progress in the era of big data, many of these methods need help to capture the complex relationships present in online learning activities and student attributes, which are essential for improving prediction accuracy. We present a novel model for predicting academic performance in this paper. This model harnesses the power of dual graph neural networks to effectively utilize both the structural information derived from interaction activities and the attribute feature spaces of students. The proposed model uses an interaction-based graph neural network module to learn local academic performance representations from online interaction activities and an attribute-based graph neural network to learn global academic performance representations from attribute features of all students using dynamic graph convolution operations. The learned representations from local and global levels are combined in a local-to-global representation learning module to generate predicted academic performances. The empirical study results demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms existing methods. Notably, the proposed model achieves an accuracy of 83.96% for predicting students who pass or fail and an accuracy of 90.18% for predicting students who pass or withdraw on a widely recognized public dataset. The ablation studies confirm the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed techniques.