Estimating Expected Student Academic Performance

Resumen

In recent decades, society has a primary need for improving edu-cation systems. Predicting the performance of students has become a referencetopic very analyzed by the research community. Currently, there are severalcutting-edge technologies that make very easy to collect educational data ininstitutional systems due to the new information management systems where almost everything is digitalized. The analysis of this information offers uniqueopportunities that have a direct impact on students, instructors and academicinstitutions programs. Concretely, we propose a modular system to evaluate teaching performance by considering several primary factors related to studentslearning process. In this work, we present thefirst module, a statistical modelthat aims at obtaining the expected student’s achievements in a particular course.Wefirst analyzed students’performance primary factors on Higher Education Systems. To identify these factors, we have conducted a literature review. Then,we examine three different techniques to build the prediction model: Multiple Linear Regression (MLR), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and ArtificialNeural Networks (ANN). To select the suitable technique, we carried out avariety of experiments by using a real dataset from University of Santa Elena(Ecuador). The achieved experiments revealed promising results.