Sabine Rathmayer, Hans Pongratz (Hrsg.

): Proceedings of DeLFI Workshops 2015

co-located with 13th e-Learning Conference of the German Computer Society (DeLFI 2015)
München, Germany, September 1, 2015 101

Educational Data Mining / Learning Analytics: Methods,

Tasks and Current Trends

Agathe Merceron1

Abstract: The 1st international conference on “Educational Data Mining” (EDM) took place in
Montreal in 2008 while the 1st international conference on “Learning Analytics and Knowledge”
(LAK) took place in Banff in 2011. Since then the fields have grown and established themselves
with an annual international conference, a journal and an association each, and gradually increase
their overlapping. This paper begins with some considerations on big data in education. Then the
principal analysis methods used with educational data are reviewed and are illustrated with some
of the tasks they solve. Current emerging trends are presented. Analysis of educational data on a
routine basis to understand learning and teaching better and to improve them is not a reality yet.
The paper concludes with challenges on the way.
Keywords: Educational data mining, learning analytics, prediction, clustering, relationship min-
ing, distillation of data for human judgment, discovery with models, multi modal analysis, multi-
level analysis, natural language processing, privacy, data scientist.

1 Introduction
“Big Data in Education” was the name of a MOOC offered on Coursera in 2013 by Ryan
Baker. What means big data in education? To answer this question I consider different
sources of educational data following the categorization of [RV 10]. Schools and univer-
sities use information systems to manage their students. Take the case of a small- medi-
um European university with 12 000 students and let us focus on the marks. Assuming
that each student is enrolled in 6 courses, each semester the administration records 60
000 new marks (including the null value when students are absent).
Many universities and schools use a Learning Management System (LMS) to run their
courses. Let us take an example of a small course, not a MOOC, taught for 60 students
on 12 weeks with one single forum, and a set of slides and one quiz per week. LMSs
record students’ interactions, in particular when students click on a resource, write or
read in the forum. Assume that each student clicks on average twice each week on the
set of slides and the quiz, and 3 times on the forum in the semester. This gives 3060
interactions that are stored for one course during one semester. Let us suppose that the
small-medium university from above has 40 degree-programs with 15 courses each. This
gives 1 836 000 interactions stored by the LMS each semester.

1
Beuth Hochschue für Technik, Fachbereich Medieninformatik, Luxemburgerstrasse 19, 13353 Berlin, merce-
[email protected]
102 Agathe Merceron

Another main source of data in education is dedicated software like Intelligent Tutoring
Systems that students use to train specific skills in one discipline. A well-known reposi-
tory for such data is Datashop [KBS10] that contains millions of interactions. On top of
those main sources of data, there are various other sources like social media, question-
naires or online forums. These simple considerations show that data in education are big
and cannot be analyzed by hand.
Research published the “international educational data mining society” or the “society of
learning analytics and research” show that analyzing these data allows us “to better un-
derstand students, and the settings which they learn in.” [BY 09]. These two societies
started around different persons with different research backgrounds [BS 14] but they
have similar aims. While research with an emphasis in machine learning appears more in
EDM and research with an emphasis on humans appear more in LAK, research that
could be published in both conferences grows each year as the citations in this paper
make clear. The next section reviews the computational methods used to analyze educa-
tional data as listed in [BY 09] and illustrates some of the tasks they solve. Current
trends are presented in section three. The conclusion presents challenges of the field.

2 Computational Methods
Methods come mainly from machine learning, data mining and, emerging in the last
years, from natural language processing; methods classical in artificial intelligence such
as the hill-climbing algorithm are occasionally used [Ba 05].

2.1 Prediction

A major task tackled by prediction methods is to predict performance of students. Pre-

dicting performance has several levels of granularity: it can be predicting that there will
be no performance at all when students drop-off [WZN13], predicting pass/fail or the
mark in a degree [ZBP11, AMP14], pass / fail or the mark in a course [LRV12] or pre-
dicting whether a student masters a given skill in a tutoring system [PHA07].
The numerous studies published in that area show that it is indeed possible to predict
drop-off or performance in a degree or in a course (MOOCs excluded) with a reasonable
accuracy, mostly over 70%. However these studies show also that there is neither one
classifier nor a set of features that work well in all contexts though a number of studies
indicate that having only socio-economic features and no marks at all lead to a poorer
accuracy [GD 06, ZBP11]. Therefore one has to investigate which methods and which
features work the best with the data at hand. I take [AMP14] to illustrate such a work.
The aim of this work is to predict the class or interval A, B, C, D or E, in which the mark
 Interaktive Visualisierung zur Darstellung und Bewertung von
Learning-Analytics-Ergebnissen in Foren mit vielen Teilnehmern 103

of the degree lies. The degree is a 4 years Bachelor of Science in Computing and Infor-
mation Technology in a technical university in Pakistan. Enrollment in this degree is
competitive: students are selected based on their marks at High School Certificate (short
HSC), average and Math-Physics-Chemistry, and on their performance on a entrance
test. Because of this context, drop-off is almost non-existent. Using in particular the
conclusions of [GD 06, ZBP11], [AMP14] conjectured that marks only, no socio- eco-
nomic features, might be enough to predict performance at the end of the degree with an
acceptable accuracy. The features that have been used to build several classifiers are
HSC marks as well as first year and second year marks in each course. Table 1 shows the
classifiers that have achieved an accuracy better than the baseline of 51.92%, the accura-
cy that is achieved when the majority class C is always predicted.

Classifier Accuracy / Kappa

Decision Tree with Gini Index 68.27% / 0.49
Decision Tree with Information Gain 69.23% / 0.498
Decision Tree with Accuracy 60.58% / 0.325
Rule Induction with Information Gain 55.77% / 0.352
1- Nearest Neighbors 74.04% / 0.583
Naives Bayes 83.65% / 0.727
Neural Networks 62.50% / 0.447
Random Forest with Gini Index 71.15% / 0.543
Random Forest with Information Gain 69.23% / 0.426
Random Forest with Accuracy 62.50% / 0.269
Tab. 1: Comparison of Classifiers
A unique feature of this work is to take one cohort to train a classifier and the
next cohort to test it, as opposed to most of the works reported in the literature
which use cross-validation, which means that only one cohort is used to train and
test the classifier. The aim of using two successive cohorts is to check how well
results generalize over time so as to use the experience of one cohort to put in place
some policy to detect weak or strong students for the following cohort. One no-
tices that 1- nearest neighbor and Naives Bayes perform particularly well although
they have the drawback of not giving a human interpretable explanation of the re-
sults: it is not possible to know whether some courses could act as detectors of
particularly poor or particularly good performance.

2.2 Clustering

Clustering techniques are used to group objects so that similar objects are in the same
cluster and dissimilar objects in different clusters. There are various clustering tech-
niques and there are many tasks that use clustering. [CGS12] for instance clusters stu-
dents and find typical participation’s behaviors in forums.
[EGL15] clusters utterances and is concerned with classifying automatically dialog acts
104 Agathe Merceron

also called speech acts within tutorial dialogs. A dialog act is the action that a person
performs while uttering a sentence like asking a question (“What is an anonymous
class?”), exposing a problem or issue, giving an answer, giving a hint (“Here an interest-
ing link about Apache Ant”), making a statement (“The explanations of the lectures
notes are a bit succinct“), giving a positive acknowledgment (“Thanks, I have under-
stood”), etc.. A common way of classifying sentences or posts into dialog acts is to use
prediction or supervised methods as done in [KLK10]. First a labeled corpus is built:
several annotators label the sentences of a corpus and identify cues or features to choose
the dialog act. Support vector machines are reported to do rather well for this kind of
task: [KLK10] reports F-score varying from 0.54 for positive acknowledgment (9.20%
of the sentences of the corpus) to 0.95 for questions (55.31% of the sentences of the
corpus). A major drawback of this approach is getting the labeled corpus, a major work
done by hand. Therefore several works such as [EGL15] investigate approaches to clas-
sify sentences without the manual labeling. The corpus of [EGL15] comes from a com-
puter-mediated environment to tutor students in introductory programming; moreover, in
this case study, students have been recorded by Kinect cameras. Sentences are described
by different kinds of features: lexical features (e.g. unigrams, word ordering, punctua-
tion), dialog-context features (e.g. utterance position, utterance length, author of the
previous message (student, tutor)), task features (e.g. writing code), posture features (e.g.
distance between camera and head, mid torso, lower torso) and gesture features (e.g.
one-hand-to-face, two-hands-to-face).
Utterances are clustered using the K-Medoids algorithm and Bayesian Information Crite-
rion (BIC) to infer the optimal number of clusters. For lexical features the distance be-
tween two utterances is calculated using their longest common subsequence and for
other features using cosine similarity. Several clusterings are performed according to the
dialog act of the previous tutor utterance. The majority vote of the utterances in each
cluster gives the dialog act or label of that cluster. To classify a new student's utterance,
the proper clustering is chosen according to the preceding dialog act of the tutor and the
distance between the new utterance and the center of each cluster is calculated. The
nearest cluster gives its dialog act to the utterance. Using a manually labeled corpus for
evaluation, and a leave-one-student-out cross-validation, an average accuracy of 67% is
reported (61.7% without posture and gesture features). Even if these results stay below
what is currently achieved with supervised methods, this approach is very promising and
continues to improve over earlier similar work such as reported in [VMN12].

2.3 Relationship Mining

[BY 09] divides this category into four sub-categories. Two of them, association rule
mining and correlation mining, are illustrated here.
[MY 05] uses the apriori algorithm for association rules to find mistakes that students
often make together while solving exercises with a logic tutor. Results include associa-
 Interaktive Visualisierung zur Darstellung und Bewertung von
Learning-Analytics-Ergebnissen in Foren mit vielen Teilnehmern 105

tions such as “if a student chooses the wrong set of premises to apply a rule, s/he is like-
ly to also make a wrong deduction when applying a rule.” Such findings have been used
to enhance the tutor with proactive feedback whenever students make a mistake belong-
ing to the found associations. One challenge in using association rules is the big number
of rules that algorithms can return and the choice of an appropriate interestingness meas-
ure to filter them [MY 10].
[BCK04] conducted observations of students while using a cognitive tutor for middle
school mathematics. Observers recorded whether students were on-task or off-task and,
when off-task, whether students were in conversation, doing something else, inactive or
gaming the system. Gaming the system means that a student uses quickly the hints of-
fered by the tutor and so finishes quickly an exercise as the solution is basically given by
the tutor. The calculation of correlations between post-tests and different off-task behav-
iors revealed that the biggest correlation in absolute value was obtained with gaming the
system: -0.38. This is high enough to indicate that gaming the system has a negative
impact on learning.

2.4 Distillation of Data for Human Judgment

This category includes statistics and visualizations that help humans make sense of
their findings and analyses. Proper diagrams on the proper data help to grasp what
happens at a glance and they form the essence of many dashboards and analyt-
ics tools such as LeMo [FEM13].
All the works presented so far show that data preparation is crucial. This remains
true for visualization. Students and their marks can be visualized by a heat map.
Clustering the students according to their marks [AMP15] and using the order given
by the clustering to build the heat map helps visualize courses that can act as
indicators of good or poor performance.

2.5 Discovery with Models

As noted in [BY 09] this category is usually absent from conventional books about
data mining or machine learning. This category encompasses approaches in which
the model obtained in a previous study is included in the data to discover more pat-
terns. An interesting illustration is given by the work of [BCR06] and [SPB15].
Building on [BCK04] the work in [BCR06] proposes a detector for gaming the sys-
tem. This detector uses only data stored in the log files recorded by the cognitive
tutor, no other source of data from sensors or cameras. Features include the num-
ber of times a specific step is wrong across all problems, the probability that the
student knows a skill as calculated by the tutor, various times such as the time taken
by the last 3 or 5 actions. Latent Response Models have been used to build the de-
tector. This detector has been shown to generalize to new students and to new les-
106 Agathe Merceron

sons of the cognitive tutor, and thus can be used to infer whether students who
used the cognitive tutor gamed the system without having to actually observe
them. The work in [SPB15] investigates the relation between different affects and
behaviors and the majors chosen in college. Students who game the system enroll
less in Science, Math. & Technology.

3 Current Trends
Over the three last editions of the EDM conferences and the last edition of the LAK
conference I observe an increase in the number of papers using following techniques:
Natural Language Processing, Multilevel Analysis and Multimodal Analysis.
Textual data produced by learners receive more attention. Methods of natural language
processing are mainly used to analyze tutorial dialogs, to model students' reading and
writing skills and to understand discussion forums. Multimodal analysis means that data
from different sources are aggregated together as illustrated earlier with [EGL15].
Multilevel analysis means that different kinds of data stored by one system are aggregat-
ed and analyzed as in the framework “Traces” [Su 15] that is used to analyze interactions
of a large community of users in a kind of learning platform offering chats, forums, file
uploads and a calendar. “Traces” extracts events from the database and constructs con-
tingency graphs which show the likelyhood that events are related. For example two
events like uploading a file and writing a message in a chat might be related by a proxi-
mal contingency if they occur close enough in time, or two events like two messages
having an overlap in their vocabulary might be related by a lexical contingency. These
graphs can be abstracted and folded at several levels, the most general level being a
sociogram which represents how actors are related through their contributions. “Traces"
can detect session of activities and in these sessions identify the main actors and those
who might be disengaged. On a much smaller scale [Me 14] relates the forum level (dia-
log acts) to the performance level in an online-course taught with a LMS.

4 Conclusion
Big data in education is a reality. There are numerous approaches to analyze educational
data, numerous tasks that are tackled and interesting findings that are discovered.
What is not a reality yet is the analysis of educational data on a routine basis to under-
stand learning and teaching better and to improve them. I see at least two challenges on
the way. One is privacy. Users of educational software have to trust what happens with
their data that systems store and analyze. A reasonable answer is opt-in: interactions are
stored only when users opt for it. This can limit the available data, hence the findings
that can be made. Another challenge is generalizability: is a classifier for predicting
 Interaktive Visualisierung zur Darstellung und Bewertung von
Learning-Analytics-Ergebnissen in Foren mit vielen Teilnehmern 107

performance still valid 2 years later or for another degree? My answer is probably not.
Validation needs to be checked regularly, which can slow down the adoption of educa-
tional data mining or learning analytics in everyday life. Models that are demanding
computationally like classifiers for performance or detectors of behaviors have to be
continuously re-established by data scientists. Nonetheless I believe that this field will
continue to grow and finds its place in everyday education.

Literaturverzeichnis
[AMP14] Asif, R.; Merceron, A.; Pathan, M.K.: Predicting Student Academic Performance at
Degree Level: A Case Study, In International Journal of Intelligent Systems and Ap-
plications (IJISA), Volume 7, Number 1, S. 49-61, 2015.
[AMP15] Asif, R., Merceron, A. and Pathan, M.K.: Investigating Performance of Students: a
Longitudinal Study. In (Blinkstein, A.; Merceron, A.; Siemens, G.; Baron, J.; Marziaz,
N.; Lynch, G. Hrsg.) Proceedings of LAK 15, ACM, S. 108-112, 2015.
[Ba 05] Barnes, T.: Q-matrix Method: Mining Student Response Data for Knowledge. In the
technical Report (WS-05-02) of the AAAI-05 Workshop on Educational Data Min-
ing. 8 p., 2005.
[BCK04] Baker, R.; Corbett, A.T.; Koedinger, K.; Wagner, A.Z.: Off-task behavior in the
cognitive tutor classroom: when students “game the system”. In Proc. Of SIGCHI con-
ference of Human Factors in Computing Systems, Vienna, Austria, 383-390, 2004.
[BCR06] Baker, R.; Corbett, A.T.; Roll, I.; Koedinger, K.: Developing a generalizable detector
of when students game the system. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction,
18(3), 287-314, 2006.
[BS 14] Baker, R.; Siemens G.: Educational data mining and learning analytics. In Sawyer, K.
(Ed.) Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences: 2nd Edition, pp. 253-274, 2014.
[BY 09] Baker, R.; Yacef, K.: The State of Educational Data Mining in 2009: A Review and
Future Visions”, In Journal of Educational Data Mining, Vol. 1(1), 2009.
[CGS12] Cobo, G., Garcia, D., Santamaria, E., Moran, J.A., Melenchon, J., Monzo, C. Using
agglomerative hierarchical clustering to model learner participation profiles in online
discussion forums. In (Dawson, S., Haythornthwaite, C. Eds.): Proceedings of the 2nd
International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge., ACM, S. 248-251,
2012.
[EGL15] Ezen-Can, A.; Grafsgaard, J.F.; Lester, J.C., Boyer, K.E.: Classifying Dtudent Dia-
logue Avts with Multimodal Learning Analytics. In (Blinkstein, A.; Merceron, A.;
Siemens, G.; Baron, J.; Marziaz, N.; Lynch, G. Hrsg.) Proceedings of LAK 15, ACM,
S. 280-289, 2015.
[FEM13] Fortenbacher, A.; Elkina, M.; Merceron, A.: The Learning Analytics Application
LeMo – Rationals and First Results. In International Journal of Computing, Volume
12, Issue 3, S. 226-234, 2013.
108 Agathe Merceron

[GD 06] P. Golding, O. Donaldson: “Predicting Academic Performance”, Proceedings of 36th

ASEE /IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, 2006.
[KBS10] Koedinger, K.; Baker, R.., Cunningham, K., Skogsholm, A., Leber, B.; Stamper, J.: “A
Data Repository for the EDM Community: The PSLC DataShop,” Handbook of Edu-
cational Data Mining, CRC Press, S. 43–56, 2010.
[KLK10] Kim, J.; Li, J.; Kim. T. Towards Identifying Unresolved Discussions in Student Online
Forums. In (Tetreault, J., Burstein, J., Leacock, C. Hrsg.): Proceedings of the 5th
Wokshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications.
(Los Angeles, CA, USA, June 2010). Association for Computational Linguistics, 84 -
91.
[LRV12] Lopez, M. I., Romero, R., Ventura, V., Luna, J.M. Classification via clustering for
predicting final marks starting from the student participation in Forums. In (Yacef, K.,
Zaïane, O., Hershkovitz, H., Yudelson, M., and Stamper, J. Hrsg.): Proceedings of the
5th International Conference on Educational Data Mining. S. 148-151, 2012.
[MY 05] Merceron, A.; Yacef, K.: Educational Data Mining: a case study. In (C.-K. Looi, G.
McCalla, B. Bredeweg and J. Breuker Eds) Proceedings of Artificial Intelligence in
Education (AIED2005), S. 467-474, 2005.
[Me 14] Merceron, A.: Connecting Analysis of Speech Acts nd Performance Analysis: a Initial
Study. In Proceedings of the Workshop 3: Computational Approaches to Connecting
Levels of Analysis in Networked Learning Communities, LAK 2014, Vol-1137, 2014.
[MY 10] Merceron, A.; Yacef, K.: Measuring correlation of Strong Association Rules in Educa-
tional Data. In (C. Romero, S. Ventura, M. Pechenizkiy & R.S.J.d. Baker Eds.) the
Handbook of Educational Data Mining. CRC Press, S. 245 -256, 2010.
[PHA07] Pardos, Z.; Hefferman, H.; Anderson, B.; Hefferman, C.: “The effect of Model Granu-
larity on Student Performance Prediction Using Bayesian Networks,” In Proceedings
of the international Conference on User Modelling, Springer, Berlin, pS 435-439,
2007.
[RV 10] Romero, C.; Ventura, S.: Educational Data Mining: A Review of the State of the
Art. IEEE transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, vol. 40(6), S.601-618, 2010.
[SPB15] San Pedro, M.O., R. Baker, N. Heffernan, J. Ocumpaugh: What Happens to Students
Who Game the System?. In (Blinkstein, A.; Merceron, A.; Siemens, G.; Baron, J.;
Marziaz, N.; Lynch, G. Hrsg.) Proceedings of LAK 15, ACM, S. 36-40, 2015.
[Su 15] Suthers, D.: From Contingencies to Network-level Phenomena: Multilevel Analysis of
Activity and Actors in Heterogeneous Networked Learning Environments. In (Blink-
stein, A.; Merceron, A.; Siemens, G.; Baron, J.; Marziaz, N.; Lynch, G. Hrsg.) Pro-
ceedings of LAK 15, ACM, S. 368-377, 2015.
[VMN12] Rus, V.; Moldovan, C.; Niraula, N.; Graesser, C.C.: Automated discovery of speech
act categories in educational games. In Proceedings of the International Conference on
Educational Data Mining, S. 25-32, 2012.
 Interaktive Visualisierung zur Darstellung und Bewertung von
Learning-Analytics-Ergebnissen in Foren mit vielen Teilnehmern 109

[WZN13] Wolff, A.; Zdrahal, Z.; Nikolov, A.; Pantucek, M.: Improving retention: predicting at-
risk students by analysing clicking behaviour in a virtual learning environment. In Pro-
ceedings of the Third International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge,
S. 145-149, 2013.
[ZBP11] Zimmermann, J.; Brodersen, K.; Pellet, J.P.; August, E.; Buhmann, J.M.: Predicting
graduate-level performance from undergraduate achievements. In Proceedings of the
4th International Conference on Educational Data Mining, S.357-358, 2011.