Missing data presents a significant challenge in Educational Data Mining (EDM). Imputation techniques aim to reconstruct missing data while preserving critical information in datasets for more accurate analysis. Although imputation techniques have gained attention in various fields in recent years, their use for addressing missing data in…

Curricular design in higher education significantly impacts student success and institutional performance. However, academic programs' complexity--shaped by pass rates, prerequisite dependencies, and course repeat policies--creates challenges for administrators. This paper presents a method for modeling curricular pathways including development of…

What does it mean for a model to be a better model? One conceptualization, indeed a common one in Educational Data Mining, is that a better model is the one that fits the data better, that is, higher prediction accuracy. However, oftentimes, models that maximize prediction accuracy do not provide meaningful parameter estimates, making them less…

Predictive models play a pivotal role in education by aiding learning, teaching, and assessment processes. However, they have the potential to perpetuate educational inequalities through algorithmic biases. This paper investigates how behavioral differences across demographic groups of different sizes propagate through the student success modeling…

Open science has become an important part of contemporary science, and some open science practices (such as data sharing) have been prominent aspects of Educational Data Mining (EDM) since the start of the field. There have been recent pushes for EDM to more fully embrace the range of open science practices that are seen in other fields. In this…

Data analytics is widely accepted as a crucial aspect of effective school leadership, yet its utilization by principals has not been thoroughly examined in scholarly works. The potential of Educational Data Mining Tools (EDM) to provide a "big picture" for principals to address equity gaps among students is overlooked in the literature.…

To train two-versus-two sports, it is beneficial to play regularly with varying teammates and opponents of similar skill level. However, even in small classes, it is almost impossible for a human instructor to maintain an accurate overview of each student's skill development to optimize teams and pairings accordingly. Therefore, we propose an…

Improving the pedagogical effectiveness of programming training platforms is a hot topic that requires the construction of fine and exploitable representations of learners' programs. This article presents a new approach for learning program embeddings. Starting from the hypothesis that the function of a program, but also its "style", can…

Despite increased efforts to assess the adoption rates of open science and robustness of reproducibility in sub-disciplines of education technology, there is a lack of understanding of why some research is not reproducible. Prior work has taken the first step toward assessing reproducibility of research, but has assumed certain constraints which…

This paper presents a tool for creating student models in logistic regression. Creating student models has typically been done by expert selection of the appropriate terms, beginning with models as simple as IRT or AFM but more recently with highly complex models like BestLR. While alternative methods exist to select the appropriate predictors for…

The value of an instructor is that she exactly recognizes what the learner is struggling with and provides constructive feedback straight to the point. This work aims at a step towards this type of feedback in the context of an introductory programming course, where students perform program execution tracing to align their understanding of Java…

This paper presents an in-depth analysis of student behavior and score prediction in the ASSISTments online learning platform. We address four research questions related to the impact of tutoring materials, skill mastery, feature extraction, and graph representation learning. To investigate the impact of tutoring materials, we analyze the…

Research studies in Educational Data Mining (EDM) often involve several variables related to student learning activities. As such, it may be necessary to run multiple statistical tests simultaneously, thereby leading to the problem of multiple comparisons. The Benjamini-Hochberg (BH) procedure is commonly used in EDM research to address this…

The Georgia Institute of Technology is proud to host the seventeenth International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM) in Atlanta, Georgia, July 14-July 17, 2024. EDM is the annual flagship conference of the International Educational Data Mining Society. This year's theme is "New tools, new prospects, new risks--educational data…

There is less attention on examining algorithmic fairness in secondary education dropout predictions. Also, the inclusion of protected attributes in machine learning models remains a subject of debate. This study delves into the use of machine learning models for predicting high school dropouts, focusing on the role of protected attributes like…