This article develops an index to measure the level of susceptibility of courses to cheating using ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer), an advanced text-based artificial intelligence (AI) language model. It demonstrates the application of the index to a sample of business courses in a mid-sized university. The study finds that the…

Random forests are a nonparametric machine learning method, which is currently gaining popularity in the behavioral sciences. Despite random forests' potential advantages over more conventional statistical methods, a remaining question is how reliably informative predictor variables can be identified by means of random forests. The present study…

The nature of teaching and learning has evolved over the years, especially as technology has evolved. Innovative application of educational analytics has gained momentum. Indeed, predictive analytics have become increasingly salient in education. Considering the prevalence of learner-system interaction data and the potential value of such data, it…

Student attrition represents one of the greatest challenges facing U.S. postsecondary institutions. Approximately 40 percent of students seeking a bachelor's degree do not graduate within 6 years; among nontraditional students, who make up half of the undergraduate population, dropout rates are even higher. In this study, we developed a machine…

Traditionally, researchers employ human raters for scoring responses to creative thinking tasks. Apart from the associated costs this approach entails two potential risks. First, human raters can be subjective in their scoring behavior (inter-rater-variance). Second, individual raters are prone to inconsistent scoring patterns…

As online learning platforms and computerized testing become more common, an increasing amount of data are collected about users. These data include, but are not limited to, response time, keystroke logs, and raw text. The desire to observe these features of the response process reflect an underlying interest in the cognitive processes and…

Purpose: The prediction of student attrition is critical to facilitate retention mechanisms. This study aims to focus on implementing a method to predict student attrition in the upper years of a physiotherapy program. Design/methodology/approach: Machine learning is a computer tool that can recognize patterns and generate predictive models. Using…

Educational stakeholders would be better informed if they could use their students' formative assessments results and personal background attributes to predict the conditions for achieving favorable learning outcomes, and conversely, to gain awareness of the "at-risk" signals to prevent unfavorable or worst-case scenarios from happening.…

Background and Aims: The fastest growing group of students with disabilities are those with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). States annually report on post-high school outcomes (PSO) of exited students. This study sought to fill two gaps in the literature related to PSO for exited high-school students with ASD and the use of state data and…

This article uses an anonymous 2014-15 school year dataset from the Directorate-General for Statistics of Education and Science (DGEEC) of the Portuguese Ministry of Education as a means to carry out a predictive power comparison between the classic multilinear regression model and a chosen set of machine learning algorithms. A multilinear…

Purpose: This study aimed to use enrollment information including demographic, family background and financial status, which can be gathered before the first semester starts, to construct early prediction models (EPMs) and extract crucial factors associated with first-year student dropout probability. Design/methodology/approach: The real-world…

Among community college leaders and others interested in reforms to improve student success, there is growing interest in adopting machine learning (ML) techniques to predict credential completion. However, ML algorithms are often complex and are not readily accessible to practitioners for whom a simpler set of near-term measures may serve as…

This paper combines a theoretical-based model with a data-driven approach to develop an Early Warning System that detects students who are more likely to dropout. The model uses innovative multilevel statistical and machine learning methods. The paper demonstrates the validity of the approach by applying it to administrative data from a leading…

Colleges have increasingly turned to predictive analytics to target at-risk students for additional support. Most of the predictive analytic applications in higher education are proprietary, with private companies offering little transparency about their underlying models. We address this lack of transparency by systematically comparing two…

Objective: This study examines how accurately a small set of short-term academic indicators can approximate long-term outcomes of community college students so that decision-makers can take informed actions based on those indicators to evaluate the current progress of large-scale reform efforts on long-term outcomes, which in practice will not be…