Visual Analytics of Learning Behavior Based on the Dendritic Neuron Model

Learning analytics, blending education theory, psychology, statistics, and computer science, utilizes data about learners and their environments to enhance education. Artificial Intelligence advances this field by personalizing learning and providing predictive insights. However, the opaque 'black box' nature of AI decision-making poses challenges to trust and understanding within educational settings. This paper presents a novel visual analytics method to predict whether a student is at risk of failing a course. The proposed method is based on a dendritic neuron model (DNM), which not only performs excellently in prediction, but also provides an intuitive visual presentation of the importance of learning behaviors. It is worth emphasizing that the proposed DNM has a better performance than recurrent neural network (RNN), long short term memory network (LSTM), gated recurrent unit (GRU), bidirectional long short term memory network (BiLSTM) and bidirectional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU). The powerful prediction performance can assist instructors in identifying students at risk of failing and performing early interventions. The importance analysis of learning behaviors can guide students in the development of learning plans.