School dropout screening through artificial neural networks based systems

Abstract

School dropout is one of the major concerns of our society. Indeed, it is a complex phenomenon, resulting in economic and social losses, either to the individual, family or the community to which the person belongs. Academic difficulty and failure, poor attendance, retention, disengagement from school together with family and socio-economic reasons can lead to such occurrence. In this work Logic Programming was used for knowledge representation and reasoning, letting the modeling of the universe of discourse in terms of defective data, information and knowledge. Artificial Neural Networks were used in order to evaluate potential situations of school dropout and the degree of confidence that one has on such a happening.