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The increase of instructional technology, e-learning resources, and online courses has created opportunities for data mining and learning analytics in the pedagogical domain. A large amount of data is obtained from this domain that can be analyzed and interpreted so that educators can understand students’ attention. In a classroom where students have their own computers in front of them, it is important for instructors to understand whether students are paying attention. We collected on- and off-task data to analyze the attention behaviors of students. Educational data mining extracts hidden information from educational records, and we are using it to classify student attention patterns. A hybrid method is used to combine various techniques like classifications, regressions, or feature extraction. In our work, we combined two feature extraction techniques: principal component analysis and linear discriminant analysis. Extracted features are used by a linear and kernel support vector machine (SVM) to classify attention patterns. Classification results are compared with linear and kernel SVM. Our hybrid method achieved the best results in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, F1, and kappa. Also, we correlated attention with learning. Here, learning corresponds to tests and a final course grade. For determining the correlation between grades and attention, Pearson’s correlation coefficient and p-value were used. 

Opportunities to apply data mining techniques to analyze educational data and improve learning are increasing. A multitude of data are being produced by institutional technology, e-learning resources, and online and virtual courses. These data could be used by educators to analyze and understand the learning behaviors of students. The obtained data are raw data that must be analyzed, requiring educational data mining to predict useful information about students, such as academic performance, among other things. Many researchers have used traditional machine learning to predict the academic performance of students, and very little research has been conducted on the architecture of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in the context of the pedagogical domain. We built a hybrid 2D CNN model by combining two different 2D CNN models to predict academic performance. Our sample comprised 1D data, so we transformed it to 2D image data to test the performance of our hybrid model. We compared the performance of our model with that of different traditional baseline models. Our model outperformed baseline models, such as k-nearest neighbor, naïve Bayes, decision trees, and logistic regression, in terms of accuracy.