Predicting middle school students’ academic achievement in mathematics with a new hybrid approach

The academic achievement of middle school students is one of the critical steps in their educational journey that affects their future academic and career prospects. During this transition period, students are faced with a variety of challenges related to their families, schools, and the individual themselves. Research shows that academic performance during these formative years is critical for future educational success and overall life success. Therefore, addressing students’ academic achievement, which depends on various factors during this period, is of particular importance for both institutional and individual planning and orientation in the future. In this study, a new hybrid approach based on artificial neural networks that enables automatic analysis of data on family, school, and individual factors affecting middle school students’ academic achievement in mathematics is proposed. A publicly available student performance dataset was used for training and testing the proposed hybrid approach and other models. This dataset consists of data such as mathematics grades, family information, residential information, and health status information for 395 students enrolled in two public schools in the Alentejo region of Portugal. The proposed approach achieved an R2 score of 88.6% in experimental studies with this data set, providing approximately 3% higher accuracy than its closest competitor among other methods in the literature.