Understanding students’ academic achievement in public High School : evidence for Portugal

Abstract

Several papers and studies have been conducted to better understand what are the main factors that influence students’ academic achievement and what measures should be taken to improve it. Therefore, based on 383.560 students’ observations, evaluated on secondary Portuguese public schools in 2014/2015 academic year, the purpose of this study is to provide a new approach to the collected data by using Data Mining predictive models. The results show differences on the academic achievement among females and male students, where females got better academic results. Access to computer and Internet found to be powerful tools in education that students can explore to their benefit and show to have a positive influence on academic results. Students benefiting from financial social support prove to have a lower performance in academic achievement. Results also point to the fact that the number of reproves still has a great negative impact on students’ academic achievement. This is one of the first studies to the best of the authors knowledge to employ analytic techniques on such a large dataset on the context of academic achievement.