Curriculum Assessment of Higher Educational Institution Using Trace-segmented Clustering

Abstract

Curriculum mining is research area that assess students’ learning behavior and compare it with the curriculum guideline. Previous work developed sequence matching alignment approach to check the conformance between students’ learning behavior and curriculum guideline. Considering only the sequence matching alignment is insufficient to understand the patterns of group of students. Another work proposed an approach by aggregating the students’ profile to represent students’ learning behavior and investigate the impact of the learning behavior to their learning performance. However, the aggregate profile approach considers the entire period of study rather than segmented period. This study proposes a methodology to assess students’ learning path with segmented period i.e. the semester of the related curriculum. The segmented-period profile generated would be the input for sequence matching alignment approach to assess the conformity of students’ behavior with the prior curriculum guideline. Real curriculum data has been used to test the effectivity of the methodology. The results show that the students can be grouped into various cluster per semesters that have different characteristic with respect to their learning behavior and performance. The results can be analyzed further to improve the curriculum guideline.