A Data-Driven Analysis of K-12 Students’ Participation and Learning Performance on an Online Supplementary Learning Platform

Due to the limitation of public school systems, many students pursue private supplementary tutoring for improving their academic performance. Different from public schools, the private online education provides diverse courses and satisfy differentiated demands of the students. Students’ behavior and performance in online supplementary learning are relevant to not only personal attributes, but also some factors such as city levels, grades and family situation. Existing studies mostly rely on panel survey/questionnaire data and few studied online private tutoring. In this paper, with 11,392 anonymous K-12 students’ 3-year learning data from one of the world’s largest online extra-curricular education platforms, we uncover students’ online learning behaviors and infer the impact of students’ home location, family socioeconomic situation and attended school’s reputation/rank on the students’ private tutoring course participation and learning outcomes. Further analysis suggests that such impact may be largely attributed to the inequality of access to educational resources in different cities and the inequality in family socioeconomic status. Finally, we study the predictability of students’ performance and behaviors using machine learning algorithms with different groups of features, showing students’ online learning performance can be predicted with MAE< 10%.