Prediction of students’ procrastination behaviour through their submission behavioural pattern in online learning

Abstract

Prediction of students' performance has been reported as a vital task which enables educators to take necessary actions to improve students’ learning. Numerous studies have concluded that students with lower procrastination tendencies archive more compared to those with higher procrastination tendencies. In this study, a new method is proposed to predict students’ procrastination tendencies discerned from their submission behavioural patterns in online learning. In this method, feature vectors signifying students’ submission patterns on homework are firstly drafted. Next, an ensemble clustering method is employed to optimally sort students into various categories of procrastination: procrastinator, procrastinator candidate, and non-procrastinator. Lastly, various classification methods are assessed to discern which one best predicts students’ procrastination tendencies. The efficacy of this approach is assessed through the data from a course comprised of 242 students at the University of Tartu in Estonia. Our study found that our method correctly identifies student procrastination from submission pattern data with 97% accuracy, and that the best performing classifier is linear support vector machine. Investigating the effect of different number of features (homework) on performance of clustering and classification methods indicate that finding the optimal number of feature to use in both clustering and classification methods is a vital task as it could potentially affect prediction power of our approach. More specifically, the results show that in our proposed approach, unlike clustering methods that show a better performance with lower number of features, classification methods mostly tend to show a better performance with larger number of features.