Feasibility of Prediction of Student's Characteristics Using Texts of Essays Written During a Fully Online Course

The possibility of predicting anticipated scores representing student's characteristics from their essay texts using a machine learning technique was examined. Student's characteristics include critical thinking disposition ability, disaster-prevention conscientiousness, and personality. First, the potential for predicting essay assessment scores from essay texts using machine learning with each set of essay reports or essay comments was confirmed. However, prediction performance of one other set of essays and other scores of student's characteristics was insufficient. When the training procedure was re-designed using both sets of essays, performance for some scores improved. The limited performance was examined and further improvement procedure was discussed.