Predicting Multi-Type Talented Students in Secondary School Using Semi-Supervised Machine Learning

Zheng, Xinzhe, Yang, Zhen-Qun, Cao, Jiannong, Cheng, Jiabei

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence 

--T alent identification plays a critical role in promoting student development. However, traditional approaches often rely on manual processes or focus narrowly on academic achievement, and typically delaying intervention until the higher education stage. This oversight overlooks diverse non-academic talents and misses opportunities for early intervention. T o address this gap, this study introduces T alentPredictor, a novel semi-supervised multi-modal neural network that combines Transformer, LSTM, and ANN architectures. This model is designed to predict seven different talent types--academic, sport, art, leadership, service, technology, and others--in secondary school students within an offline educational setting. Drawing on existing offline educational data from 1,041 local secondary students, T alentPredictor overcomes the limitations of traditional talent identification methods. By clustering various award records into talent categories and extracting features from students' diverse learning behaviors, it achieves high prediction accuracy (0.908 classification accuracy, 0.908 ROCAUC). This demonstrates the potential of machine learning to identify diverse talents early in student development. ALENT is a critical component in human society. It is indispensable to the development of societies and the competitiveness of countries. Last but not least, talent is always in high demand. Thus, nurturing talent is the top priority for every part of the earth, and in it, talent identification is the foundation, as you must have a target individual to nurture talent. Traditional talent identification aims to give students tests that exceed their current level. For example, give grade eight students college admissions tests and use the result of the tough test as a talent score.