Applying classification techniques on temporal trace data for shaping student behavior models

Differences in learners' behavior have a deep impact on their educational performance. Consequently, there is a need to detect and identify these differences and build suitable learner models accordingly. In this paper, we report on the results from an alternative approach for dynamic student behavioral modeling based on the analysis of time-based student-generated trace data. The goal was to unobtrusively classify students according to their time-spent behavior. We applied 5 different supervised learning classification algorithms on these data, using as target values (class labels) the students' performance score classes during a Computer-Based Assessment (CBA) process, and compared the obtained results. The proposed approach has been explored in a study with 259 undergraduate university participant students. The analysis of the findings revealed that a) the low misclassification rates are indicative of the accuracy of the applied method and b) the ensemble learning (treeBagger) method provides better classification results compared to the others. These preliminary results are encouraging, indicating that a time-spent driven description of the students' behavior could have an added value towards dynamically reshaping the respective models.