Computers in Human Behavior 98 (2019) 166–173

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Computers in Human Behavior

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/comphumbeh

Prediction of academic performance associated with internet usage T

behaviors using machine learning algorithms
Xing Xua,b,c,∗, Jianzhong Wanga, Hao Pengd, Ruilin Wua,∗∗
a
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China
b
Informatization Office, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China
c
School of Information Technology and Engineering, University of Ottawa, Ottawa K1N 6N5, Canada
d
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China

A R T I C LE I N FO A B S T R A C T

Keywords: College students are facilitated with increasingly convenient access to the Internet, which has a civilizing in-
Higher education fluence on students' learning and living. This study attempts to reveal the association between Internet usage
Academic performance behaviors and academic performance, and to predict undergraduate's academic performance from the usage data
Internet usage behaviors by machine learning. A set of features, including online duration, Internet traffic volume, and connection fre-
Behavior discipline
quency, were extracted, calculated and normalized from the real Internet usage data of 4000 students. Three
Self-control
Machine learning
common machine learning algorithms of decision tree, neural network and support vector machine were used to
predict academic performance from these features. The results indicate that behavior discipline plays a vital role
in academic success. Internet connection frequency features are positively correlated with academic perfor-
mance, whereas Internet traffic volume features are negatively associated with academic performance. From the
perspective of the online time features, Internet time consumed results in unexpected performance between
different datasets. Furthermore, as the number of features increase, prediction accuracy is generally improved in
the methods. The results show that Internet usage data are capable of differentiating and predicting student's
academic performance.

1. Introduction self-control dilemma of problematic Internet usage (Dunbar, Proeve, &

In the recent decades, universities are providing the students with
increasingly convenient and easy access to the campus network. It is
simple for students to connect to the Internet almost everywhere and
anytime with computers and smart devices on the campus. Nowadays,
the effect of Internet use on students' academic performance remains
controversial. The application of the Internet beneficially influences
students' engagement in self-directed learning Rashid and Asghar
(2016). The knowledge or new skills found on the Internet boost the
academic performance of the students with relatively low self-efficacy
(Zhu, Chen, Chen, & Chern, 2011). A study has demonstrated that the
Internet has positive effects on educational attainment (Suhail &
Bargees, 2006). In addition, with the appearance of the MOOC and E-
learning platforms, there are abundant learning resources that play a
positive role in promoting students' academic achievement (Jung & Lee,
2018). However, Internet can also negatively impact on the students’
academic progress. The pervasiveness of the Internet has activated a
Roberts, 2018). Internet usage behaviors are shown to be associated
with academic performance. Higher rates (Ravizza, Hambrick, & Fenn,
2014) and excessive use (Cao, Masood, Luqman & Ali, 2018; Muusses,
Finkenauer, Kerkhof, & Billedo, 2014) of Internet were reported to be
associated with poorer academic achievement. The study of Cao, Gao,
Lian, Rong, Shi, Wang et al. (2018) expressed that Internet addiction is
the uppermost reason resulting in the failure of university study in
China. Moreover, with the increasing popularity of smartphones, stu-
dents spend considerable time in mobile communication, learning,
entertainment, information seeking, social networking and gaming,
which are based on the Internet. Recent research has shown that uni-
versity students with a high risk of smartphone addiction are less likely
to achieve high academic performance (Giunchiglia, Zeni, Gobbi,
Bignotti, & Bison, 2018; Hawi & Samaha, 2016).
There are extensive residential universities and colleges in the world
(e.g. most Chinese universities, and residential colleges such as those in
universities such as Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, etc.). These

∗
Corresponding author. Informatization Office, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China.
∗∗
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: xuxing66@buaa.edu.cn (X. Xu), wjz@buaa.edu.cn (J. Wang), penghao@act.buaa.edu.cn (H. Peng), wuruilin@buaa.edu.cn (R. Wu).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.04.015
Received 30 January 2019; Received in revised form 7 April 2019; Accepted 19 April 2019
Available online 20 April 2019
0747-5632/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
X. Xu, et al.
campuses adopt centralized management, and the campus-Internet
basically covers the entire area. Students have individual accounts
which enable 24-h access to the campus-Internet for study, entertain-
ment, or social contact etc. Self-control as a protective factor for
Internet use can help improve academic competence and ensure pro-
blems get resolved (Wills, Pokhrel, Morehouse, & Fenster, 2011). Stu-
dents' academic engagements (Zhang, Qin, & Ren, 2018) and perceived
value of learning as a focal goal behavior (Dunbar et al., 2018) would
not be undermined by the temptations of non-academic Internet using,
since good behavioral self-control involves attributes such as the ten-
dency to plan ahead, consider alternatives before acting, and link be-
haviors and consequences over time (Wills et al., 2011). On the con-
trary, problematic Internet usage being attributed to an individual's
weak self-control inflicts the negative educational outcomes (Kim,
Namkoong, Ku, & Kim, 2008). In other words, Internet usage data that
contains a number of behavioral records are able to reflect students'
learning perceptions, study state, physical activity, and future job
prospects etc. (Gialamas, Nikolopoulou, & Koutromanos, 2013; Zhang,
Tran, Huong, Hinh, Nguyen, Tho et al., 2017). Analysis on these data
discovered various interesting relationships between online behavioral
variables and academic performance. For example, Internet using for
general or educational purposes can promote students' academic self-
efficacy and positively correlate with academic performance (Chen,
Hsiao, Chern, & Chen, 2014). Behaviors in a learning management
system can be utilized as effective predictors for students' academic
success (Xing, Chen, Stein, & Marcinkowski, 2016). The smartphone
and Internet technologies collectively result in more time consumption
on Internet surfing than studying, which negatively affects academic
achievement (Giunchiglia et al., 2018). Additionally, our previous
study (Xu, Wang, & Wang, 2016) revealed that the test failure rate can
be predicted from undergraduates' online usage behaviors. Hence, we
assert that the Internet usage data provides researchers an unobtrusive
way to investigate the relationship between student's online usage be-
haviors and educational activities.
Studies on analyzing and predicting academic performance from
students' online behavioral data, which allow for intervening in ad-
vance to provide guidance in students' learning, are not scarce. Some
researchers focused on the MOOC platform or the learning management
system log data that record student's system operation to analyze and
predict final grade in a specific course (Helal et al., 2018; Jiang,
Williams, Schenke, Warschauer, & O'dowd, 2014; Romero, López, Luna,
& Ventura, 2013; Xing et al., 2016). However, corresponding data are
difficult to collect because these kinds of systems are not available for
each course at every university. Moreover, these data only target a
specific course, and are hard to be used to represent students' engage-
ment in all courses. As an effective tool, questionnaire survey is always
used to collect Internet usage data to reveal the association between
online behaviors and academic achievement (Apuke & Iyendo, 2018;
Chen et al., 2014; Junco, 2012). Nonetheless, an acknowledged dis-
advantage of these studies is the lack of assurance because behavioral
information may be erroneously reported by students (Giunchiglia
et al., 2018; Lee, Ahn, Nguyen, Choi, & Kim, 2017). In addition, for
revealing the relationship between Internet usage and academic per-
formance, some studies used special smart-phone applications to track
students' activities (Giunchiglia et al., 2018; Wang, Harari, Hao, Zhou,
& Campbell, 2015). However, this is restricted to online behaviors on a
single-device. By contrast, full-time students' Internet usage as a kind of
behavioral data on campus is widely available and can be easily col-
lected for educators. To our best knowledge, the application of full-time
Internet usage on academic performance analysis and prediction has
not been reported so far.
To predict students' academic performance, it is essential to find out
helpful variables of Internet usage that could contribute to the effective
prediction. There are extensive literature (Adelantado-Renau, Diez-
Fernandez, Beltran-Valls, Soriano-Maldonado, & Moliner-Urdiales,
2018; Cao et al., 2018; Choi, Cho, Lee, Kim, & Park, 2018; Davis, 2001;
167
Computers in Human Behavior 98 (2019) 166–173
Feng, Wong, Wong, & Hossain, 2019; Malhi, Bharti, & Sidhu, 2016;
Muusses et al., 2014; Servidio, 2014; Zhang et al., 2018) that examined
the excessive Internet use and disclosed the connection between In-
ternet usage and academic performance. Generally, researchers have
been focusing on online time (Cao et al., 2018; Malhi et al., 2016;
Muusses et al., 2014) and Internet connection frequency (Feng et al.,
2019; Servidio, 2014) as the important Internet usage behavioral
variables. Besides, several studies (Dunbar et al., 2018; Lau, 2017;
Samaha & Hawi, 2016) focused on the usage of specific aspects and
pointed out that activities based on the Internet involving human-ma-
chine interaction and entertainment-based Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applica-
tions, such as online game playing, video watching, photo & video
sharing, videos & music files transferring etc., are attractive and have
an increased risk of being addicted to the Internet. Usually, these online
activities account for high percentage of Internet traffic volume (Novak,
2008). Namely, except for online time, Internet connection frequency,
Internet traffic consumption might be a type of novel and meaningful
variables to be emphasized. Furthermore, many studies unfolded the
online behavioral effect on academic performance from the temporal
perspective. For example, the study of Tang, Xing, and Pei (2018) in-
dicated that the first temporal segment of the online learning experi-
ence was recognized as the most critical moment. Notably, Internet
usage in the different divided time slots of each day provides important
attributes to reflect students' behaviors and habits. Our pervious study
(Xu et al., 2016) have taken a careful insight into the daily 24 h Internet
usage behaviors and revealed that terminating the Internet connection
at 12 a.m. would be helpful for students' academic performance. A re-
cent study further showed that surfing online for entertainment during
the early morning (12 a.m.–6 a.m.) revealed the association with In-
ternet addiction to have negative academic performance (Choi et al.,
2018). In sum, combined with the real Internet usage data, we con-
cluded that online time, internet connection frequency, internet traffic
volume and online time in divided time slots comprising the basic In-
ternet usage behaviors are potential features for predicting students’
academic achievements.
In the current work, we aim to use students' real Internet usage data
as a novel metric measure to reveal the potential relationship between
Internet behaviors and academic performance. To be specific, Internet
usage behaviors comprises of online time, internet connection fre-
quency, internet traffic volume and online time in 48 divided time slots.
We will identify the ways in which students are significantly different
between performer's groups. And then, we apply commonly used ma-
chine learning algorithms to verify the effectiveness of predicting aca-
demic performance from students' Internet usage data. The research
objectives addressed are:
1) Investigate significant differences between performance groups for
the online usage behaviors.
2) Identify Internet usage features that correlate with students' aca-
demic performance.
3) Predict student's performance from the Internet usage data with
supervised learning models.
2. Material and methodology
2.1. Dataset
This study focuses on the final grades of undergraduate students’
compulsory courses as their academic achievement. The compulsory
courses, also called required courses or core courses, are deemed es-
sential for an academic degree.
The undergraduate students' grades of compulsory courses were
obtained from a university's academic affair management system.
Accordingly, the students were divided into different subgroups. Two
different ways of sub-grouping were adopted in this study: 1) a sub-
group of passed students and a subgroup of failed students, which could
X. Xu, et al.
Table 1
The fragment of raw data.
UID Online time (Second) Offline time (Second)
1 1,475,856,004 1,475,857,219
2 1,475,856,029 1,475,861,245
3 1,475,856,034 1,475,873,602
4 1,475,856,065 1,475,856,078
5 1,475,856,198 1,475,873,885
… … … …
help to investigate the internet behaviors of students who are at risk for
a test failure; 2) a subgroup of high score students and one of non-high
score students, which could be helpful to identify behavior features of
high-score students. Here, we identify a student with a passed label if
all required courses were passed, and a failed label means that the
student failed at least one exam. The student who passed the tests and
whose average grade of all required courses was no less than 90 (full
marks of 100) was labeled as high-score. On the other hand, non-high-
score represents the average grade less than 90.
Internet usage data were collected from a university's Internet ac-
cess system. Students' Internet usage, for example each access to the
Internet resources on the campus with their accounts, were recorded.
The dataset contains online time, offline time, Internet download vo-
lume, Internet upload volume, terminal device type, etc. Online time
and offline time, which are always generated in timestamp format,
represent the detailed time of the login and logout; Internet download
volume represents data from Internet to user terminal; Internet upload
volume denotes data from user terminal to Internet. These columns of
volume are calculated from network packages by the Internet access
system, and can be described by the unit byte. Table 1 shows the
fragment of raw data.
2.2. Population and samplings
According to the final test of the autumn semester 2016, there were
14,926 undergraduates that had taken the final examination of the
compulsory courses. 20.21% students failed at least one test, and
10.34% undergraduates belonged to the high-score group.
As mentioned above, we adopted two ways of sub-grouping, i.e.
passed group and failed group in the passed & failed dataset; and high-
score group and non-high-score group in the high-score & non-high-
score dataset. In order to balance the sample size, we randomly chose
1000 students from each group in the two sub-datasets. Then, we ob-
tained the Internet usage data of the sample students. Removing the
National day from the dataset, there was a long period of 80 days when
there were no holidays from 2016 to 10-8 until 2016-12-26. Thus, most
students were supposed to live on campus, and kept continuous Internet
usage records. Altogether, we obtained more than 20 million records
from 4000 sample students of the two datasets.
Among these Chinese participants, the majority are male students
(n = 3085, 77.13%), while the remaining are female (n = 915,
22.87%). The student cohort consist of sophomores (n = 1143,
28.58%), junior students (n = 1102, 27.55%), senior students
(n = 886, 22.15%) and freshmen (n = 869, 21.72%). The age dis-
tribution are: 19 years-old (n = 1028, 25.7%), followed by 20 years-old
(n = 970, 24.25%), 21 years-old (n = 783, 19.58%), 18 years-old
(n = 692, 17.3%), 22 years-old (n = 303, 7.57%), and then those aged
23 years and above (n = 126, 3.15%), as well as aged 17 and below
(n = 98, 2.45%).
The overview of the sample datasets is presented in Fig. 1 for passed
& failed students and in Fig. 2 for high-score & non-high-score students,
respectively. In Figs. 1 and 2, distribution of the average daily online
duration, the average daily download volume, the average daily upload
volume, and the average daily number of Internet connections as raw
Internet usage variables are expressed separately. Y-axis represents
Computers in Human Behavior 98 (2019) 166–173
Download volume (Bytes) Upload volume (Bytes) Terminal device
321,525 219,947 iPhone
24,901,898 712,326 Android
89,014,930 2,333,833 Windows 10
1,065,582,274 16,695,871 Windows 7
29,944,161 2,168,729 Linux
… …
number of students, and X-axis shows the values of the corresponding
variable. Combined with the descriptive analysis, it can be found from
Fig. 1-a and Fig. 2-a that, more than 75% of the students in both da-
tasets spent half a day on the Internet, and some students from each
group connected to the Internet almost all day. A high proportion of
students were online for 900–1300 min per day. As shown in Fig. 1-b,
higher than 50% of the students from passed & failed dataset accessed
to the Internet less than 9 times a day. Meanwhile, over 50% high-score
& non-high-score students exceeded 10 times of Internet connection
from Fig. 2-b. The peak frequency of Internet connections occurred
between 3 and 6 times per day in both datasets. From Fig. 1-c and
Fig. 2-c, more than 50% of the students consumed more than 1 GB
download volume per day. But most students had less than 1 GB upload
volume per day as shown in Fig. 1-d and Fig. 2-d.
3. Methods
Because the raw data of Internet Usage cannot be directly employed
for calculation, it was transformed to computable variables for the
further use. As we know, students should have different tasks at dif-
ferent times. For example, 6–8 a.m., 12–13 p.m., 18–20 p.m. are usually
meal-time; 8 a.m. - 12 p.m. and 14–18 p.m. are usually the time to take
courses or self-study; and midnight-to-dawn is sleeping time, etc. In
order to obtain more informative data reflecting Internet behaviors, the
24-h online period is divided into half-an-hour time slots, i.e. 0:00–0:29
a.m., 0:30–0:59 a.m …. 23:00–23:29 p.m., 23:30–23:59 p.m., which are
indicated by Time1 to Time48. The average online duration within
every half-an-hour time slots and the average daily total online duration
of each student are then calculated.
In addition, the preference of mobile device or PC device can be
extracted from the raw data, which also indicates the Internet con-
nection frequency with different terminals per day. Besides the features
of online duration and connection frequency, the average volumes of
Internet data consumed per day are also calculated. After data pre-
processing, the features from the Internet usage dataset are divided into
three categories, which are listed in Table 2.
To reveal the difference between usage features and performance
level, Mann-Whitney U test is performed to test the significance of the
differences between groups because of their skewed distributions.
Then, the Spearman's correlation coefficient is applied to quantify the
correlation between academic performance and students' behavioral
features above. Finally, for examining the substantive validity of pre-
diction from Internet usage data, decision tree (DT), neural network
(NN), support vector machine (SVM), as three common machine
learning predictive algorithms for classification to make the novel
features and predictive framework have generalized value, are per-
formed to predict student's study performance.
4. Results
4.1. Difference between performance groups for the internet behaviors
In order to investigate whether these groups of students (passed vs.
failed, high-score vs. non-high-score) differed on their Internet beha-
viors, non-parametric Mann-Whitney U test was used. Comparisons of
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X. Xu, et al. Computers in Human Behavior 98 (2019) 166–173

Failed students

a b

c d
Fig. 1. The distribution of the passed & failed dataset, the daily online duration (a), the daily number of connections (b), the daily download data (c), the daily upload
data (d).

the features of daily online duration, Internet traffic volume and con-
nection frequency between different subgroups are listed in Table 3.
From Table 3, the result reveals that features of Internet volume and
connection frequency have significant differences between passed and
failed students. Most features also show significant differences between
high-score and non-high-score students, except for mobile connection
frequency and total connection frequency. Failed students score sig-
nificantly higher on download volume, upload volume and total volume
compared to passed students. But in terms of connection frequency,
passed students are reported significantly higher. They also spend
longer time on Internet per day in average than the counterparts, de-
spite not significant. Meanwhile, high-score students score significantly

a b

c d
Fig. 2. The distribution of the high-score & non-high-score dataset, the daily online duration (a), the daily number of connections (b), the daily download data (c), the
daily upload data (d).

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X. Xu, et al. Computers in Human Behavior 98 (2019) 166–173

Table 2 Time21 (r=0.108, p < 0.001), Time22 (r=0.103, p < 0.001),

The features set from Internet usage dataset.
Categories Online duration Internet volume Connection frequency
Features Time1 Download volume Mobile connection
Time2 Upload volume PC connection
… Total volume Total connection
Time47
Time48
Daily online duration
lower on daily online duration, download volume, upload volume, total
volume compared to their counterparts. On the contrary, they have
significantly higher PC connection than the students from the low-score
group.
Figs. 3 and 4 depict the mean values of daily 48-time slots between
different groups. On average, passed students of Fig. 3 spent much more
time on Internet within every time slot, with the exception of early
morning (Time5 - Time16). And it can be found from Fig. 4 that non-
high-score students were more likely to use the Internet almost in each
time slot. For group comparison the Mann-Whitney U test was used. The
test result between passed and failed students presented that, all the
nodes showed significant differences, excluding the Time4, Time5,
Time15, Time16, Time17 of Fig. 3. On the other hand, there were
significant differences on 39 time slots between non-high-score and
high-score undergraduates, except for Time1, Time19 - Time23 and
Time46 - Time48 of Fig. 4.
4.2. Correlating internet usage features with academic performance
The well-known Spearman's nonparametric correlation analysis was
performed to quantify the correlation strength between academic per-
formance and features. Table 4 lists the test results, which exclude daily
48-time slots.
As shown in Table 4, students' academic performance from passed &
failed dataset displayed a statistically significant association with all the
connection frequency features. And the study performance also in-
dicated a significant negative relationship with download volume (r=-
0.161, p < 0.001) and total volume (r=-0.146, p < 0.05). From the
high-score & non-high-score dataset, students’ performance showed a
significant correlation with daily online duration (r=-0.101,
p < 0.001), download volume (r=-0.237, p < 0.001), upload volume
(r=-0.118, p < 0.001), total volume (r=-0.227, p < 0.001), and PC
connection frequency (r=0.110, p < 0.001).
As for the correlation results between performance and daily 48-
time slot, we also performed the Spearman's nonparametric correlation
tests. Students' academic performance in the passed & failed dataset was
significantly positively related to Time1 (r=0.106, p < 0.001),
Time19 (r=0.103, p < 0.001), Time20 (r=0.111, p < 0.001),
Time23 (r=0.101, p < 0.001), Time46 (r=0.111, p < 0.001),
Time47 (r=0.117, p < 0.001), and Time48 (r=0.112, p < 0.001).
Meanwhile, in the high-score & non-high-score dataset, students' study
performance was significantly negatively correlated with Time5 (r=-
0.119, p < 0.001), Time6 (r=-0.143, p < 0.001), Time7 (r=-0.152,
p < 0.001), Time8 (r=-0.148, p < 0.001), Time9 (r=-0.141,
p < 0.001), Time10 (r=-0.136, p < 0.001), Time11 (r=-0.134,
p < 0.001), Time12 (r=-0.132, p < 0.001), Time13 (r=-0.130,
p < 0.001), Time14 (r=-0.123, p < 0.001), and Time15 (r=-0.109,
p < 0.001).
4.3. Predicting the academic performance
Although some significant differences have been observed, this
point of the view gained by the difference analysis with Mann-Whitney
U test cannot be directly applied to make predictions about academic
performance. The significant correlation implies that the Internet be-
haviors can be considered as feature classes to predict students’ aca-
demic performance. We applied DT, SVM, and NN as supervised
learning techniques. The detailed usage features were normalized for
promoting the computing efficiencies of SVM and NN, because Decision
Tree-based estimators are robust to arbitrary scaling of the data.
In order to figure out the effective features for the model, three
feature groups were formed by involving different combination of
features, as follows: 1) Group_1 comprises the features of online dura-
tion category; 2) Group_2 contains features from categories of online
duration and Internet volume. Besides the features of Group_1 above,
there are three Internet traffic features; 3) Group_3 is made up of all the
three categories features, in which mobile connection frequency, PC
connection frequency and total connection frequency are added based
on the group 2.
The datasets with different feature groups were loaded into the
predictive models. And then we estimated the held-out data to obtain
the predictive results of passed & failed and high-score & non-high-
score separately. Each of those two classes contains the same number of
students, corresponding to a baseline accuracy of 50%.
Considering the randomness of the computation, to confirm the
validity of the results, each feature group was computed by every ma-
chine learning model. And then computation for ten times was per-
formed to obtain the average predictive accuracy. The python programs
were used in the study. Fig. 5 shows the predicting results from dif-
ferent features with the three methods.
The finding indicated that the accuracies of all the techniques were
improved as the number of features increased. Especially, except for the
results of DT approaches, predicting accuracies from Group_3 features
were significantly higher than the results from Group_1. The average
prediction results of DT ranged 60.95%–62.30% from passed & failed
dataset and ranged 58.15%–60.35% from the features of another

Table 3
Difference between performance groups without 48-time slots.
Features Failed students (n = 1000) Passed students U Non-high-score students High-score students U
(n = 1000) (n = 1000) (n = 1000)

M(SD) M(SD) M(SD) M(SD)

Daily online duration 893.04 (382.45) 944.77 (298.63) 4.871E5 944.96 (326.25) 906.49 (296.56) 4.418E5∗∗∗
Download volume 2.13E9 (1.957E9) 1.49E9 (1.285E9) 4.068E5∗∗∗ 1.79E9 (1.588E9) 1.20E9 (1.466E9) 3.633E5∗∗∗
Upload volume 4.77E8 (1.091E9) 3.68E8 (7.512E8) 4.745E5∗ 4.49E8 (1.146E9) 2.88E8 (5.934E8) 4.318E5∗∗∗
Total volume 2.6E9 (2.614E9) 1.86E9 (1.723E9) 4.16E5∗∗∗ 2.24E9 (2.324E9) 1.48E9 (1.777E9) 3.691E5∗∗∗
Mobile connection 9.17(10.64) 10.21(9.81) 4.328E5∗∗∗ 10.43(10.64) 10.11(10.29) 4.975E5
PC connection 2.29(2.46) 3.00(3.05) 3.931E5∗∗∗ 2.73(2.62) 3.10(2.44) 4.362E5∗∗∗
Total connection 11.45(11.60) 13.21(11.07) 4.226E5∗∗∗ 13.16(11.77) 13.21(11.30) 4.838E5

∗∗∗
p < 0.001.
∗∗
p < 0.01.
∗
p < 0.05.

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X. Xu, et al. Computers in Human Behavior 98 (2019) 166–173

Fig. 3. The mean values of half-an-hour online duration of passed & failed dataset.

Fig. 4. The mean values of half-an-hour online duration of high-score & non-high-score dataset.

Table 4 model has effective predicting power from Internet usage data between
Correlations using Spearman's Rho coefficient. passed and failed, and between high-score and non-high-score respec-
Features Passed & Failed High-score & Non-high-score
tively.
dataset dataset

Daily online duration 0.022 −0.101∗∗∗

5. Discussion
Download volume −0.161∗∗∗ −0.237∗∗∗
Upload volume −0.044 −0.118∗∗∗ The study aimed to discover the difference of Internet usage beha-
Total volume −0.146∗ −0.227∗∗∗ viors between undergraduate students’ academic performance levels, as
Mobile connection 0.116∗∗∗ 0.004
well as the association between the behaviors and academic perfor-
PC connection 0.185∗∗∗ 0.110∗∗∗
Total connection 0.134∗∗∗ 0.028 mance. Further, we explored whether Internet usage behaviors can be
used to predict their academic performance. We found that Internet
∗∗∗
p < 0.001. usage data have a valid predictable power for academic performance of
∗∗
p < 0.01. individuals.
∗
p < 0.05. The results showed that there were significant differences between
academic performance groups for the Internet behaviors. Higher
dataset; the average predicting results of NN ranged 67.75%–70.95% Internet traffic volumes were consumed by students from lower per-
and ranged 63.70%–68.70%; SVM showed 69.55%–72.75% and formance groups, implying that the students might always use the
65.35%–69.55%. The highest values of average accuracy for the SVM Internet for leisure with heavy Internet traffic, for example playing
were 72.75% ± 2.14% (Mean ± SD) and 69.55% ± 1.38% video games, using video chat, watching or downloading videos etc.,
(Mean ± SD) from the two experiments, respectively. These values which supports the points of Chen and Peng (2008) stating that non-
were 9.20%–10.45% and 0.85%–1.80% higher than the accuracies with heavy Internet using students had better academic grades than heavy
the DT and NN, respectively. users addicted to non-academic web surfing. Considering the significant
Although the accuracies of DT were significantly lower than the differences regarding daily online duration and Internet traffic volume
values of NN and SVM with any feature group, the average predictive between academic performance groups, it could be argued that students
results exceed the baseline accuracy by about 12.30% in passed & failed with heavy Internet usage might not have the necessary effective skills
dataset and about 10.35% in high-score & non-high-score dataset. to use the Internet in a way that contributes to their academic
Accordingly, using NN and SVM instead of DT result in the performance achievements, this result is in line with Uzun and Kilis (2019). The
of about 20.95% (from passed & failed data), 18.70% (from high-score undergraduates from the better groups accessed to Internet more fre-
& non-high-score data), and 22.75% (from passed & failed data), quently everyday than the students of opposite groups did, which could
19.55% (from high-score & non-high-score data) above baseline. As the be explained by that the students might be inclined to surf Internet as
results indicate, when the academic performance class is provided, the needed with strong self-control for obtaining study resources and

171
X. Xu, et al.
Fig. 5. The predicting results from different features with the three methods. Predictive results are presented as box plots, in which the box indicates quartile values;
the whiskers indicate the upper and lower values. Means with different letters differ significantly (Tukey's-b post hoc test, α = 0.05; a > b > … > e).
experiences to get better achievements. It is consistent with the re-
search of Rashid and Asghar (2016). Nevertheless, this result contra-
dicts with the study (Servidio, 2014) that frequency of Internet con-
nections per day strongly related to Internet addiction bringing about
poorer academic achievement. In addition, from Time47 to Time12 of
the daily online time slots, the students from better performance groups
seemed to disconnect the network more quickly than the students in
counterpart groups. It could be argued that in comparison with those
from higher performance groups students from lower performance
groups are more likely to take a high risk of being addicted to the In-
ternet, due to their worse self-control. And after 6:00 a.m. students
began to get up and connect to Internet. Expectedly the students from
the better groups seems be more likely to get up earlier than the other
ones. Combining with offline-online trends during the early morning, it
can be recognized that the students with better study performance have
a more powerful behavior discipline and live a “regular life”, this result
is similar to Cao et al. (2018) and Kassarnig et al. (2018). It is also in
line with the literature of Adelantado-Renau et al. (2018) that reveals
higher grades with better sleep quality, in which Internet use time was
used as a mediator. These interesting findings should be taken into
consideration by educators, who should concentrate on potential ways
to control the use of Internet during the bedtime.
As for the correlation between academic performance and Internet
usage behaviors, students’ performance was significantly negatively
associated with sub-dimensions of Internet traffic volumes and online
duration (high-score & non-high-score dataset). It means, along with
the increase of download volume Internet connection duration and,
academic performance decreases. It is in line with the literature in-
dicating that the increase of technology usage leads to the decrease of
academic performance (Uzun & Kilis, 2019). Unexpectedly, the current
study found that academic performance is not significantly related to
daily online duration and is significantly positively related to these
divided time slots in the passed & failed dataset, it could be argued that
test failure might not depend on the daily online duration, and that
students might be encouraged to spend more time using Internet for
study at 9 a.m. - 12 p.m. and 22:30 p.m. - 12:30 a.m. for preventing test
failure. Considering the positive and significant results regarding con-
nection frequency, it could be argued that in order to avoid the inter-
ference from Internet, students of better performance might get access
to the Internet for the purpose in a planned way, instead of connecting
to the Internet for long period, this contradicts with a previous study
(Servidio, 2014) stating that frequency of Internet connections per day
were significantly and positively related to Internet addiction, resulting
in adverse effects on academic performance.
In the predictive experiments, three algorithms were conducted to
predict students' academic performance from grouped Internet usage
features. The results showed that a classification accuracy of around 23
percentage points above baseline, which is in a similar level with the
172
Computers in Human Behavior 98 (2019) 166–173
study of Kassarnig et al. (2018) based on the smartphone usage data.
The accuracy is also in a similar level with the best prediction sub-
model of student's passing or failing the course from the online activity
data generated from the university learning management system (LMS),
in which the accuracy ranges 71%–76% (Helal et al., 2018). Mean-
while, online usage behaviors of this study achieve higher classification
accuracy than students' enrolment data of the studies (Helal et al.,
2018; Kovacic, 2012). Although some studies (Romero et al., 2013;
Xing et al., 2016) have obtained higher accuracy than our approaches,
their studies just aimed at only one course, and the multiple dimension
features around that course were computed. Course-specific predictions
are restricted in the applicability, whereas the academic performance
predicted in our study might have a realistic extensive application.
Besides predicting whether students pass or not, we also take high score
or not as the academic achievement to test the predictive model.
Moreover, we achieved the prediction accuracies of feature Group_3
scored significantly higher on NN and SVM than Group_1. Furthermore,
despite no significant difference observed, feature Group_2 resulted in
slightly higher prediction accuracies on average compared with
Group_1. To summarize, the students' Internet usage data are effective
for predicting academic performance, and the richness of features will
help to increase prediction accuracy.
6. Conclusions
In summary, Internet usage data as a new metrics to assess student's
academic performance are proposed. Our findings reveal that there are
some significant differences of online behaviors between academic
performance groups. Moreover, the features of Internet behaviors are
significant correlated to academic performance. The results indicate
that behavior discipline plays a vital role in student's academic success.
It is obvious that Internet usage data are effective for predicting aca-
demic performance, and the increase of Internet behavioral features can
remarkably improve the prediction accuracy. Internet usage data can be
collected easily and conveyed to rich behavioral information.
Combining the generality of machine learning techniques, the pre-
dictive procedure of this study has strong practical value for improving
the educational management, especially in residential universities and
colleges. We hope that this demonstration will stir interest to further
study the impact of the Internet usage on academic performance, as
well as the interplay of individual and real Internet behaviors.
Further research can be conducted by adding more behavioral fea-
tures to provide a more comprehensive reference for the educators to
develop student learning management. Since Internet resource types
(i.e. entertainment, study, socialization, news etc.) with the access time
of each type can comprehensively reflect students' Internet behavior,
here we recommend that future study should include more data on
online behavior. For example, Internet resource types, temporal
X. Xu, et al.
distribution of access to different resources, etc. could be considered.
Furthermore, the involvement of more demographic data is re-
commended. For example, birthplace and family details, which can
reflect students’ cultural backgrounds, may have an impact on the re-
lationship between online behavior and academic performance.
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of China
Scholarship Council (CSC).
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