Predictive analytics is widely used in various domains, including education, to inform decision-making and improve outcomes. However, many predictive models are proprietary and inaccessible for evaluation or modification by researchers and practitioners, limiting their accountability and ethical design. Moreover, predictive models are often opaque…

While high-accuracy machine learning (ML) models for predicting student learning performance have been widely explored, their deployment in real educational settings can lead to unintended harm if the predictions are biased. This study systematically examines the trade-offs between prediction accuracy and fairness in ML models trained on the…

Background/Context: Predictive analytics has emerged as an indispensable tool in the education sector, offering insights that can improve student outcomes and inform more equitable policies (Friedler et al., 2019; Kleinberg et al., 2018). However, the widespread adoption of predictive models is hindered by several challenges, including the lack of…

Although an increasing number of ethical data science and AI courses is available, with many focusing specifically on technology and computer ethics, pedagogical approaches employed in these courses rely exclusively on texts rather than on algorithmic development or data analysis. In this paper we recount a recent experience in developing and…

This paper introduces a novel approach to identify at-risk students with a focus on output interpretability through analyzing learning activities at a finer granularity on a weekly basis. Specifically, this approach converts the predicted output from the former weeks into meaningful probabilities to infer the predictions in the current week for…