Temporal analysis of academic performance in higher education before, during and after COVID-19 confinement using artificial intelligence

Abstract

This study provides the profiles and success predictions of students considering data before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a field experiment of 396 students and more than 7400 instances, we have analyzed students’ performance considering the temporal distribution of autonomous learning during courses from 2016/2017 to 2020/2021. After applying unsupervised learning, results show 3 main profiles from the clusters obtained in the simulations: students who work continuously, those who do it in the last-minute, and those with a low performance in the whole autonomous learning. We have found that the highest success ratio is related to students that work in a continuous basis. However, last-minute working is not necessarily linked to failure. We have also found that students’ marks can be predicted successfully taking into account the whole data sets. However, predictions are worse when removing data from the month before the final exam. These predictions are useful to prevent students’ wrong learning strategies, and to detect malpractices such as copying. We have done all these analyses taking into account the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, founding that students worked in a more continuous basis in the confinement. This effect was still present one year after. Finally, We have also included an analysis of the techniques that could be more effective to keep in a future non-pandemic scenario the good habits that were detected in the confinement.