Researchers from ACE-DS to identify factors influencing students’ academic performance in Rwanda higher learning institutions

17-07-2020

Researchers from African Centre of Excellence in Data Science are poised to identify factors influencing the students’ performance in Rwanda Higher Learning Institution using student-generated data. In a project entitled‘Prediction of students’ academic performance using learning analytics in Rwanda”, researchers tend to apply machine learning techniques on student-generated data to predict students’ academic performance in Rwanda higher learning institutions.

One of the aspects through which Rwanda expects to achieve the sustainable development goals is to have a knowledge driven economy through quality education.

The project is inspired by the bigger proportion of poor performance of the first and second class students compared to their peers from third and fourth yearshence a need to identify factors influencing this poor performance of year one and year two students in Rwanda higher learning institutions.

Dr. Charles Ruranga, Director of ACEDS, one of the researchers working on this project argues that time has come to use students data to find tangible solutions to challenges still evident in education sector. “ It’s appealing to integrate learning analytics in higher learning institutions in Rwanda by using student generated data for the prediction of educational outcomes, with the purpose of improving and optimizing learning processes in Rwanda”, he said.

This research tends to determine the association between students’ former high school background (12YBE vs.others) and academic performance at undergraduate studies in 1st and 2nd year, develop a prototype to automate early warning of students at risk of poor performance and early detect students at risk of poor performance in Higher Learning Institutions in Rwanda using machine-learning techniques among other objectives.

This project is one of big multidisciplinary/collaborative research projects that the African Centre of Excellence in Data Science (ACE-DS) has initiated and is supporting which are relevant and have impact on society.

Story by
Jean Damascène NIYITEGEKA
Communication & Marketing Specialist/UR SPIU