Published In
Education Sciences
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-25-2025
Subjects
Academic success factors -- graduation outcomes
Abstract
Students’ perceptions of their likelihood to graduate are important determinants of their academic engagement, yet these perceptions remain understudied. This study, which is based on the 2021 Monitoring the Future survey of 8th- and 10th-grade students in the United States, uses machine learning algorithms to identify the most important factors that influence these perceptions. Among the tested models, random forest provided the best classification performance. Using permutation-based feature importance, we identified frequent participation in schoolwork, maternal education, paternal education, and homework completion as the most important predictors of students’ graduation perceptions. These results highlight the importance of targeted and well-coordinated intervention measures and policy reforms that can boost students’ engagement in learning and parental education support, especially for students from underrepresented populations or low-income families. As such, this study provides evidence-based insights to guide educational strategies aimed at improving academic outcomes and reducing disparities by identifying key contributors to students’ views on graduating.
Rights
© 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Locate the Document
DOI
10.3390/educsci15060670
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/43937
Publisher
MDPI AG
Citation Details
Alhassan, D., Fatah, Z., Codjoe, P. M., Kuno, C. B., & Ofori-Boateng, D. (2025). Homework, Households, and Hurdles: The Unexpected Drivers of Student Graduation Perceptions. Education Sciences, 15(6), 670.