Modelling the dynamics of the students’ academic performance in the German region of the North Rhine-Westphalia: an epidemiological approach with uncertainty

Student academic underachievement is a concern of paramount importance in Europe, where around 15% of the students in the last high school courses do not achieve the minimum knowledge academic requirement. In this paper, we propose a model based on a system of differential equations to study the dynamics of the students academic performance in the German region of North Rhine-Westphalia. This approach is supported by the idea that both, good and bad study habits, are a mixture of personal decisions and influence of classmates. This model allows us to forecast the student academic performance by means of confidence intervals over the next few years.