Feature Discovery in the Context of Educational Data Mining: An Inductive Approach

Contents

Automated learning environments collect large amounts of information on the activities of their students. Unfortunately, analyzing and interpreting these data manually can be tedious and requires substantial training and skill. Although automatic techniques do exist for mining data, the results are often hard to interpret or incorporate into existing scientific theories of learning and education. We therefore present a model for performing automatic scientific discovery in the context of human learning and education. We demonstrate, using empirical results relating the frequency of student self-assessments to quiz performance, that our framework and techniques yield results better than those available using human-crafted features.