A Case Based Reasoning View of School Dropout Screening

Abstract

The cause for student dropout is often termed as the antecedent of failure, since it stands for a key event, which leads to dropout. Indeed, school dropout is well thought out as one of the major worries of our times. It is a multi-layered and complex phenomenon, with many triggers, namely academic striving and failure, poor attendance, retention, disengagement from school or even socio-economic motives. School dropout represents economic and social losses to the individual, family and community. However, it may be prevented if the educational actors hold pro-active strategies (e.g., taking into account similar past experiences). Indeed, this work will start with the development of a decision support system to assess school dropout, centered on a formal framework based on Logic Programming for Knowledge Representation, complemented with a Case-Based Reasoning approach to problem solving, which caters for the handling of incomplete, unknown, or even contradictory information, i.e., it improves the analysis enactment of the retrieving cases process.