A PCA Study of Student Performance Indicators in a Web 2.0-Based Learning Environment

Analyzing student performance indicators has been a long-standing research direction, nowadays demanding for new multidimensional approaches tailored to the recent advent of Web 2.0 in education. This paper investigates two such potential learning performance indicators: i) students´ active involvement with the Web 2.0 tools and ii) students´ learning styles. By using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) we were able to identify a subset of student activities that are relevant to build up an orthogonal space of representation and those activities that may support prediction of learner success (measured as final grades). On the other hand, no significant correlations were found between the Felder-Silverman learning styles and students´ performance in our case study.