Abstract:

In education science research, data collection is challenging due to difficulty identifying students at the higher education level, privacy concerns, and varying levels of student engagement. Importantly, psychological questionnaires can be lengthy, leading to incomplete responses. We conducted repeated studies, and over time, the focus of the research adapted, introducing new materials and consequently leading to missing learner characteristics in some datasets.

In this research, the issue of incomplete learner characteristics is addressed using data from three different studies: winter term 2022/2023 (n=297), summer term 2023 (n=274), and winter term 2023/2024 (n=25). These studies collected various learner characteristics, such as learning styles, personalities, learning strategies, and learning element preferences. However, learning element preferences and learning strategies were missing in the winter term of 2022, and the summer term of 2023 respectively. To analyze the data and predict these missing features, statistical analysis, and machine learning techniques were employed. Then, these models are rigorously evaluated using cross-validation and performance metrics like accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. Our findings provide insights into the relationships between learners' learning styles, personalities, learning strategies, and learning element preferences. This offers valuable implications for the design and implementation of educational interventions, like learning path recommendations. The results imply that machine learning models can predict missing learner characteristics, thus addressing the problem of incomplete data in educational research

Keywords:

Machine Learning, Statistical Analysis, Missing Data, Student Assessment, Higher Education Area, Personalized Learning Paths.