Attention-Based Artificial Neural Network for Student Performance Prediction Based on Learning Activities

Student performance prediction was deployed to predict learning performance to identify at-risk students and provide interventions for them. However, prediction models should also consider external factors along with learning activities, such as course duration. Thus, we aim to distinguish the difference factor between the time dimension (duration of the course) and the feature dimension (students' learning activities) by attention weights to provide helpful information and improve predictions of student performance. In this study, we introduce Attention-Based Artificial Neural Network (Attn-ANN), a novel model in educational data mining. The Attn-ANN combines attention weighting on the time and feature dimensions to examine the significance of lectures and learning activities and makes predictions by visualizing attention weight. We found that the Attn-ANN had a better area under the curve scores than conventional algorithms, and the attention mechanism allowed models to focus on input selectively. Incorporating the attention weighting of both the time and feature dimensions improved the prediction performance in an ablation study. Finally, we investigated and analyzed the model's decision, finding that the Attn-ANN may be able to create synergy in real-world scenarios between the Attn-ANN's predictions and instructors' expertise, which underscores a novel contribution to engineering applications for interventions for at-risk students.