Using Assessment Point Accumulation as a Guide to Identify Students at Risk for Interrupted Academic Progress

Area of Science:

• Medical Education
• Student Performance Analysis
• Academic Progress Tracking

Background:

• Interruptions in academic progress (IP) pose significant challenges for students and educational institutions.
• Early identification of students at risk for IP is crucial for implementing timely remediation strategies.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a method for early identification of medical students at risk of interruptions in academic progress.
• To adapt the concept of pediatric growth curves to analyze student academic trajectories.

Main Methods:

• Collected and analyzed cumulative examination performance data for 518 medical students over five academic years.
• Calculated individual student performance slopes relative to the class mean.
• Utilized a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) approach to determine the optimal predictive threshold.

Main Results:

• A slope of -5 was identified as an excellent screening tool for predicting IP, demonstrating 85% accuracy.
• The method achieved 82% sensitivity and 86% specificity, with an area under the curve of 0.917.
• Early identification of 25 out of 38 students facing IP was possible as early as the fifth assessment point.

Conclusions:

• The developed method offers an innovative, inexpensive, and highly accurate approach for identifying students at risk of academic interruptions.
• Further research will focus on optimizing interventions and validating this predictive model in other educational programs.