A Rough Set Based Approach to Find Learners' Key Personality Attributes in an E-Learning Environment

One of the challenges in personalized e-learning research is how to find the unique learning strategies according to a learner’s personality characteristic. A learner’s personality characteristic may have many attributes, and all of them may not have equal values. Correlation analysis, regression analysis, discriminator function, and educational psychology have been used to find solutions, but these methods have their shortcomings. This article proposes an improved approach based on rough set theory to find the key personality attributes and evaluates the importance of these attributes. The approach has been successfully used in the actual e-learning environment for a major research university in China.