In educational systems, predictive models face significant challenges during initial deployment and when new students begin to use them or when new exercises are added to the system due to a lack of data for making initial inferences, often called the cold start problem. This paper tests logitdec and logitdecevol, "evolutionary" features…

Teacher classroom teaching behavior indicators serve as a crucial foundation for guiding instructional evaluation. Existing indicator system suffers from limitations such as strong subjectivity and weak contextual generalization capabilities. Generalized category discovery (GCD) enables automatic data clustering to identify known categories and…

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…

Feedback on how students progress through completing subgoals can improve students' learning and motivation in programming. Detecting subgoal completion is a challenging task, and most learning environments do so either with "expert-authored" models or with "data-driven" models. Both models have advantages that are…

This work explores how population-based engagement prediction can address cold-start at scale in large learning resource collections. The paper introduces: (1) VLE, a novel dataset that consists of content and video based features extracted from publicly available scientific video lectures coupled with implicit and explicit signals related to…

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union contains directions on how user data may be collected, stored, and when it must be deleted. As similar legislation is developed around the globe, there is the potential for repercussions across multiple fields of research, including educational data mining (EDM). Over the past two…

The University of Palermo is proud to host the 18th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM) in Palermo, Italy, from July 20 to July 23, 2025. EDM is the annual flagship conference of the International Educational Data Mining Society. This year's theme is "New Goals, New Measurements, New Incentives to Learn." The theme…

There is a growing need to empirically evaluate the quality of online instructional interventions at scale. In response, some online learning platforms have begun to implement rapid A/B testing of instructional interventions. In these scenarios, students participate in series of randomized experiments that evaluate problem-level interventions in…

High-quality feedback requires understanding of a student's work, insights into what concepts would help them improve, and language that matches the preferences of the specific teaching team. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate coherent feedback, adapting these responses to align with specific teacher preferences remains an open…

Deep learning models for text classification have been increasingly used in intelligent tutoring systems and educational writing assistants. However, the scarcity of data in many educational settings, as well as certain imbalances in counts among the annotated labels of educational datasets, limits the generalizability and expressiveness 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…

Although the fields of educational data mining and learning analytics have grown significantly in terms of analytical sophistication and the breadth of applications, the impact on theory-building has been limited. To move these fields forward, studies should not only be driven by learning theories, but should also use analytics to in form and…

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…

The gold-standard for evaluating the effect of an educational intervention on student outcomes is running a randomized controlled trial (RCT). However, RCTs may often be small due to logistical considerations, and resulting treatment effect estimates may lack precision. Recent methods improve experimental precision by incorporating information…

Data mining of course enrollment and course description records has soared as institutions of higher education begin tapping into the value of these data for academic and internal research purposes. This has led to a more than doubling of papers on course prediction tasks every year. The papers often center around a single prediction task and…