Abstract:

Several study programs consider the scheme of succession or seriation courses, meaning that for taking one course, students must have approved at least one previous one. In this approach, it is expected that a student acquire the adequate knowledge for the next course. However, there are several factors that affect this approach. Consider for example the case when a student barely approves a previous course, it is possible that it does not acquire the sufficient knowledge for the later one.

Consider now the influence of non academic factors, like a strike, could be considered that a strike could affect the immediate scholar period when it occurs, however, in a study plan with a scheme of seriated courses, this impact could be extended.

In a previous work, it was analyzed the impact of a strike considering the academic performance of engineering students in the courses which were taken in the scholar period where a strike occurred. Results showed that there was not a significant effect of the strike over the academic performance of the students, with a behavior quite similar to the scholar periods before and after the strike.

Despite the analysis considered previous, later and the directly affected scholar periods, the analyzed courses were considered as independents, meaning that was not considering the performance in the previous and the later ones.

Considering this relationship in the courses, this work presents the analysis of the academic performance of Mexican Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana’s (UAM) engineering students in the seriation relationship over a group of Mathematics’ courses. UAM in 2019 suffered from the longest strike in its history.

For this, was considered the following criteria:
Amount of students that approved a previous course and the obtained mark in the later one.
A more detailed analysis considering the obtained mark in the previous course, at UAM, there are three possible approving marks (Very Good, Good and Sufficient).

Three sets of seriated courses are analyzed: Introduction to Calculus with the next one, Differential Calculus, Differential Calculus and Integral Calculus and finally, Integral Calculus with Differential Equations.

For determining if there exists a possible effect of the strike in the performance over a chain of seriated courses, were analyzed the academic data of hundreds of students considering the mentioned Mathematic courses taken in the scholar periods before the strike and the same courses taken in the scholar period of the strike, then were obtained the performance of the students in the next courses.

Results are presented using different visual information techniques, which combined with the statistical analysis of educational data is called visual educational analytics. The obtained results will determine if a strike really has a significant impact, expected as a negative one, over the academic performance of students.

Keywords:

Academic issues, scholar strikes impact, academic performance over courses, educational analytics.