ERIC Number: EJ1230292
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2019-Sep
Pages: 27
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: EISSN-2157-2100
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Will This Course Increase or Decrease Your GPA? Towards Grade-Aware Course Recommendation
Morsy, Sara; Karypis, George
Journal of Educational Data Mining, v11 n2 p20-46 Sep 2019
In order to help undergraduate students towards successfully completing their degrees, developing tools that can assist students during the course selection process is a significant task in the education domain. The optimal set of courses for each student should include courses that help him/her graduate in a timely fashion and for which he/she is well-prepared for so as to get a good grade in. To this end, we propose two different "grade-aware course recommendation" approaches to recommend to each student his/her optimal set of courses. The first approach ranks the courses by using an objective function that differentiates between courses that are expected to increase or decrease a student's GPA. The second approach combines the grades predicted by grade prediction methods with the rankings produced by course recommendation methods to improve the final course rankings. To obtain the course rankings in both approaches, we adapt two widely-used representation learning techniques to learn the optimal temporal ordering between courses. Our experiments on a large dataset obtained from the University of Minnesota that includes students from 23 different majors show that the grade-aware course recommendation methods can do better on recommending more courses in which the students are expected to perform well and recommending fewer courses which they are expected not to perform well in than grade-unaware course recommendation methods.
Descriptors: Undergraduate Students, Grade Point Average, Course Selection (Students), Prediction, Program Effectiveness, Models, Educational Benefits, Majors (Students), Course Content, Difficulty Level, Accuracy
International Educational Data Mining. e-mail: jedm.editor@gmail.com; Web site: http://jedm.educationaldatamining.org/index.php/JEDM
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: National Science Foundation (NSF); US Army Research Office (ARO)
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Minnesota
Grant or Contract Numbers: 1447788; 1704074; 1757916; 1834251; W911NF1810344
Author Affiliations: N/A