Early Prediction of Student Performance with LSTM-Based Deep Neural Network

The shift to hybrid teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic brought about a real challenge to predict student performance and conduct timely interventions on at-risk students. This study proposed a deep neural network supporting the early prediction of student performance. Bidirectional LSTM, Global Average Pooling, and TIME MASK structure were utilized in the improved GritNet model. Subsequently, this study optimized the hyperparameters with the aid of the hill-climbing algorithm. Finally, on-campus data sets were used in experiments to evaluate the model's performance. Data were collected from a course that carried out multiple iterations from Fall 2021 to Fall 2022. In Fall 2022, the proposed model achieved a ROC-AUC value of 95.47% in the 8th week, while the baseline model only achieved 91.44% in the same week. Besides, the proposed model achieved a ROC-AUC value of 89.67% in the 4th week, which meant it had acceptable prediction performance in the early stage. The experimental findings demonstrated that the model was capable of predicting the academic performance of students in hybrid courses early on.