@article {837, title = {CROSS-NATIONAL COMPARISONS OF STUDENTS{\textquoteright} SCIENCE SUCCESS BASED ON GENDER VARIABILITY: EVIDENCE FROM TIMSS}, journal = {Journal of Baltic Science Education}, volume = {19}, year = {2020}, month = {April/2020}, pages = {Continuous}, type = {Original article}, chapter = {186-200}, abstract = {Identifying key determinants of success plays an important role in efforts of assessing the current state of educational practices and implementing effective actions to improve academic performance. Given how important is accurate identification of these determinants for valid comparisons, the aim of this research was to present extensive comparative results on 8th grade students{\textquoteright} science success for 39 countries. To this end, a total number of 229,493 students{\textquoteright} information obtained from the last cycle of Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study was handled. Unlike previous studies in which success has been tried to be explained with some factors, this research extended the literature by investigating the effective factors as well as gender-related variability on science success with a holistic view. Using heterogeneous choice models, unobserved heterogeneity caused by gender difference was tested and controlled. The findings showed that gender variability was evident for 10 countries. Furthermore, factors associated with students{\textquoteright} future educational goals, home educational resources and confidence were found as the common determinators of science success in all participant countries. Another notable finding was all factors, except time spent on doing homework, tended to differentiate the success status between girls and boys of 22 countries.}, keywords = {cross-country comparison, gender variability, heterogeneous choice models, science success}, issn = {1648-3898}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.33225/jbse/20.19.186}, url = {http://oaji.net/articles/2020/987-1586941252.pdf}, author = {{\"O}yk{\"u}m Esra A{\c s}k{\i}n and Ersoy {\"O}z} } @article {751, title = {FINDING THE BEST ALGORITHMS AND EFFECTIVE FACTORS IN CLASSIFICATION OF TURKISH SCIENCE STUDENT SUCCESS}, journal = {Journal of Baltic Science Education}, volume = {18}, year = {2019}, month = {April/2019}, pages = {Continuous}, type = {Original article}, chapter = {239-253}, abstract = {Educational Data Mining (EDM) is an important tool in the field of classification of educational data that helps researchers and education planners analyse and model available educational data for specific needs such as developing educational strategies. Trends International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) which is a notable study in educational area was used in this research. EDM methodology was applied to the results of TIMSS 2015 that presents data culled from eighth grade students from Turkey. The main purposes are to find the algorithms that are most appropriate for classifying the successes of students, especially in science subjects, and ascertaining the factors that lead to this success. It was found that logistic regression and support vector machines {\textendash} poly kernel are the most suitable algorithms. A diverse set of features obtained by feature selection methods are {\textquotedblleft}Computer Tablet Shared{\textquotedblright}, {\textquotedblleft}Extra Lessons Last 12 Month{\textquotedblright}, {\textquotedblleft}Extra Lessons How Many Month{\textquotedblright}, {\textquotedblleft}How Far in Education Do You Expect to Go{\textquotedblright}, {\textquotedblleft}Home Educational Resources{\textquotedblright}, and {\textquotedblleft}Student Confident in Science{\textquotedblright} and these features are the most effective features in science success.}, keywords = {classification algorithms, educational data mining, eighth grade, science success, TIMSS 2015}, issn = {1648-3898}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.33225/jbse/19.18.239}, url = {http://oaji.net/articles/2019/987-1554359678.pdf}, author = {Enes Filiz and Ersoy {\"O}z} }