EduFlow: Análise do desempenho acadêmico de estudantes universitários utilizando técnicas de Visualização de Informação

Abstract

Researchers in the field of Education seek to understand the academic performance of undergraduate students, exploring the influence of various factors such as attendance, grades, and other aspects. The analysis of academic data can assist in understanding the relationship between curricular components and students' academic performance, enabling the identification of potential causes of deficiencies in these curricular components. Strategies focusing on the visualization of academic performance present satisfactory results regarding the analysis of grades, past absences, grade prediction, student characteristics, student interactions within a module, and progression patterns. However, these approaches have some limitations, such as the lack of correlations between information to identify the real causes of student success or failure in their enrolled modules and the use of very basic layouts that do not fully explore the potential of the data for decision-making. Furthermore, they do not provide an overview of the correlations between subjects and student performance. For instance, students who take module "A" first may perform better in module "B", or insights on which modules have the highest absenteeism rates and the possible reasons behind this issue. Given this scenario, we propose EduFlow, a new system for visual analysis of university students' academic performance data, utilizing interactive Information Visualization techniques. We believe that the use of visual representations that highlight patterns and trends related to educational processes allows users to better understand these phenomena and supports decision-making by education professionals, consequently improving students' learning processes. EduFlow employs layouts focused on analyzing academic performance over one or multiple semesters to track performance evolution and understand how certain moments or events impact students' success and module achievements.