Practice exams make perfect: incorporating course resource use into an early warning system

Abstract

Early Warning Systems (EWSs) are being developed and used more frequently to aggregate multiple sources of data and provide timely information to stakeholders about students in need of academic support. As these systems grow more complex, there is an increasing need to incorporate relevant and real-time course-related information that could be predictors of a student's success or failure. This paper presents an investigation of how to incorporate students' use of course resources from a Learning Management System (LMS) into an existing EWS. Specifically, we focus our efforts on understanding the relationship between course resource use and a student's final course grade. Using ten semesters of LMS data from a requisite Chemistry course, we categorized course resources into four categories. We used a multinomial logistic regression model with semester fixed-effects to estimate the relationship between course resource use and the likelihood that a student receives an "A" or "B" in the course versus a "C." Results suggest that students who use Exam Preparation or Lecture resources to a greater degree than their peers are more likely to receive an "A" or "B" as a final grade. We discuss the implications of our results for the further development of this EWS and EWSs in general.