Using Predictive Modelling to Identify Students at Risk of Poor University Outcomes

Pengfei Jia and Tim Maloney ()
Additional contact information
Tim Maloney: Department of Economics, Faculty of Business and Law, Auckland University of Technology

No 2014-03, Working Papers from Auckland University of Technology, Department of Economics

Abstract: We use predictive modelling to identify students at risk of not completing their first-year courses and not returning to university in the second year. Our aim is two-fold. Firstly, we want to understand the pathways that lead to unsuccessful first-year experiences at university. Secondly, we want to develop simple, low-cost tools that would allow universities to identify and intervene on vulnerable students when they first arrive on campus. This is why we base our analysis on administrative data routinely collected as part of the enrolment process from a New Zealand university. We assess the ‘target effectiveness’ of our model from a number of perspectives. This approach is found to be substantially more predictive than a previously developed risk tool at this university. Students in the top decile of risk scores account for over 29% of first-year course non-completions and more than 23% of second-year student non-retentions at this university

Keywords: Predictive Risk Modelling; University Failure and Dropout Behaviour; and New Zealand (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2014-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.aut.ac.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/ ... omics-WP-2014-03.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aut:wpaper:201403

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Auckland University of Technology, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gail Pacheco ().