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Predicting student performance for educational organizations such as universities, community colleges, schools, and training centers will enhance the overall results of these organizations. Big data can be extracted from the internal systems of these organizations, such as exam records, statistics about virtual courses, and e-learning systems. Finding meaningful knowledge from extracted data is a challenging task. In this paper, we proposed a modified version of Harris Hawks Optimization (HHO) algorithm by controlling the population diversity to overcome the early convergence problem and prevent trapping in a local optimum. The proposed approach is employed as a feature selection algorithm to discover the most valuable features for student performance prediction problem. A dynamic controller that controls the population diversity by observing the performance of HHO using the k-nearest neighbors (kNN) algorithm as a clustering approach. Once all solutions belong to one cluster, an injection process is employed to redistribute the solutions over the search space. A set of machine learning classifiers such as kNN, Layered recurrent neural network (LRNN), Naïve Bayes, and Artificial Neural Network are used to evaluate the overall prediction system. A real dataset obtained from UCI machine learning repository is adopted in this paper. The obtained results show the importance of predicting students' performance at an earlier stage to avoid students' failure and improve the overall performance of the educational organization. Moreover, the reported results show that the combination between the enhanced HHO and LRNN can outperform other classifiers with accuracy equal to 92 % , since LRNN is a deep learning algorithm that is able to learn from previous and current input values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]