Using discriminant analysis to identify students at risk

In designing any educational intervention one often needs to determine what factors are related to success and failure in a course, identify students at risk, evaluate the impact of any new program on student performance. In this paper we will discuss the use of discriminant analysis as a technique for addressing all of these issues. Discriminant analysis is a statistical technique designed to investigate the differences between two or more groups of people with respect to several underlying variables. This technique is more appropriate than commonly used educational measures (correlations, regression weights, etc.) because the variable being predicted is categorical. Moreover, this approach results in a unit of analysis, predicted category membership, that is more useful in evaluating instructional interventions