Improving Students' Learning Persistence in Introductory Statistics Course: Mid-term Grade Matters

Statistics is a required course for most college students, and it always makes students feel anxious because of the fear of success and feeling of stress. The anxiety can affect students' learning persistence and result in low academic achievement. The mid-term exam is a standard assessment to reflect students' learning outcomes during the middle of the semester. From many past studies, many researchers have identified midterm exams as a critical factor that can affect the final grade and has a positive relationship with final exam grades. However, in this study, we investigate 119 students' mid-term and final grades, and we found that students with higher midterm exam grades are most likely to have lower final exam grades, and vice versa, students with the lower midterm, achieve better final exam grades. We also employ a deep neural network to predict students' final performance because learning is a non-linear process with many uncertainties. With the model interpretation, the results also show that the mid-term exam and the assignments around the mid-term exam period are the most critical factors to affect students' final performance. Therefore, monitoring students' mid-term grades and taking some incentive strategies to improve their learning persistence is essential and vital for students to succeed in introductory statistics courses.