Volume 4 • Issue 2 • PP: 01–10 • 2025
Predicting Academic Outcomes in Secondary Education: Ensemble Classification with Grade Trajectories, Attendance Behaviour, and Socioeconomic Context
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Early identification of students at risk of academic failure is a persistent challenge in educational technology, with direct implications for student retention, institutional equity, and the allocation of support resources. Although supervised machine learning has been widely applied to student outcome prediction, the relative merit of competing algorithm classes and the degree to which demographic and behavioural features contribute predictive power beyond prior academic assessments remain incompletely resolved in the secondary school context. This paper presents a structured comparative evaluation of five supervised classifiers trained on a rich combination of periodic grades, attendance records, sociodemographic characteristics, and lifestyle indicators drawn from secondary school students. A dual importance analysis— combining impurity-based measures with held-out permutation importance—disentangles the distinct predictive roles of grade trajectories, absenteeism, parental background, and lifestyle variables. Ensemble methods demonstrate consistent superiority across all evaluation criteria, with prior periodic assessments and attendance emerging as the dominant predictors. Parental education level introduces a socioeconomic gradient that operates independently of student controlled factors, generating structural inequities that standard grade-monitoring systems are unlikely to address. These findings provide both a methodological benchmark for secondary school prediction tasks and practical guidance for institutions designing equitable and evidence-based early warning interventions.
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References
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