Identifying Struggling Students by Comparing Online Tutor Clickstreams

ABSTRACT

New ways to identify students in need of assistance are imperative to the evolution of online tutoring platforms. Currently implemented models to identify struggling students use costly and tedious classroom observation paired with student’s platform usage, and are often suitable for only a subset of students. With the recent influx of new students to online tutoring platforms due to COVID-19, a simple method to quickly identify struggling students could help facilitate effective remote learning. To this end, we created an anomaly detection algorithm that models the normal behavior of students during remote learning and recognizes when students deviate from this behavior. We demonstrated how anomalous behavior revealed which students needed additional assistance and predicted student learning outcomes. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.