An investigation of the relationship between online activity on Studi.se and academic grades of newly arrived immigrant students : An application of educational data mining

Sammanfattning: This study attempts to analyze the impact of an online educational resource on academic performances among newly arrived immigrant students in Sweden between the grade six to nine in the Swedish school system. The study focuses on the web based educational resource called Studi.se made by Komplementskolan AB.The aim of the study was to investigate the relationship between academic performance and using Studi.se. Another purpose was to see what other factors that can impact academic performances.The study made use of the data mining process, Cross Industry Standard for Data Mining (CRISP-DM), to understand and prepare the data and then create a regression model that is evaluated. The regression model tries predict the dependent variable of grade based on the independent variables of Studi.se activity, gender and years in Swedish schools. The used data set includes the grades in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and religion of newly arrived students in Sweden from six municipalities that have access to Studi.se. The data used also includes metrics of the student’s activity on Studi.se.The results show negative correlation between grade and gender of the student across all subjects. In this report, the negative correlation means that female students perform better than male students. Furthermore, there was a positive correlation between number of years a student has been in the same school and their academic grade. The study could not conclude a statistically significant relationship between the activity on Studi.se and the students’ academic grade.Additional explanatory independent variables are needed to make a predictive model as well as investigating alternative regression models other than multiple linear regression. In the sample, a majority of the students have little or no activity on Studi.se despite having free access to the resource through the municipality.