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…

This paper reports the results of using a three-layer backpropagation artificial neural network to predict item difficulty in a reading comprehension test. Two network structures were developed, one with and one without a sigmoid function in the output processing unit. The data set, which consisted of a table of coded test items and corresponding…