Educational Data Mining: A Review and Analysis of Student’s Academic Performance

Every year students success rate was analysed by the Educational Institutions to develop their Academic standard. To identify the success rate many kinds of techniques are used such as statistics, physical examination and currently ongoing datamining techniques. Data mining Techniques was widely used in many fields, it is also used in the Educational environment known as Educational Data Mining (EDM). Educational data mining generate prototype in solving the research problems in students data and used to locate the unseen patterns in the students detailed dateset. This paper uses the EDM to characterize the distinct factors affecting the students performance by making predictions with efficient algorithms. Educational professionals have to identify the causes for the student failure in academic performance and the students not succeed in completing their education which becomes a social problem these days. The machine learning algorithms help the researchers for evaluation of student’s learning habits, their academic performance and added enhancement if required. This paper would discuss different kinds of algorithms to analyse the economic background of the students which mainly affects the students performance. The dataset was utilized from the UCI Repository of secondary school students performance and analysed using the Weka tool for the datamining process.

In recent years, research on Educational Data Mining (EDM) has developed rapidly. However, most researches focus on data source issues, and ignore the importance of data preprocessing and data mining algorithms. This paper has studied EDM, with a special focus on educational big data mining algorithms. Firstly, it analyzed the relevant elements of EDM and introduces big data technology based on the requirements of educational data application. Then it introduced the common educational big data mining algorithms and their applications, and finally discussed the development trend of educational big data mining algorithms.

PurposeThis paper aims to evaluate educational data mining methods to increase the predictive accuracy of student academic performance for a university course setting. Student engagement data collected in real time and over self-paced activities assisted this investigation.Design/methodology/approachClassification data mining techniques have been adapted to predict students’ academic performance. Four algorithms, Naïve Bayes, Logistic Regression, k-Nearest Neighbour and Random Forest, were used to generate predictive models. Process mining features have also been integrated to determine their effectiveness in improving the accuracy of predictions.FindingsThe results show that when general features derived from student activities are combined with process mining features, there is some improvement in the accuracy of the predictions. Of the four algorithms, the study finds Random Forest to be more accurate than the other three algorithms in a statistically significant way. The validation of the best-known classifier model is then tested by predicting students’ final-year academic performance for the subsequent year.Research limitations/implicationsThe present study was limited to datasets gathered over one semester and for one course. The outcomes would be more promising if the dataset comprised more courses. Moreover, the addition of demographic information could have provided further representations of students’ performance. Future work will address some of these limitations.Originality/valueThe model developed from this research can provide value to institutions in making process- and data-driven predictions on students’ academic performances.

Educational data mining (EDM) evaluates and predicts students' performance that assists to discover important factors affecting students' academic performance and also guides educational managers to make appropriate decisions accordingly. The most common technique for discovering meaningful information from the educational database is classification. The accuracy of classification algorithms on educational data can be increased by applying feature selection algorithms. Feature selection algorithms help in selecting robots and meaningful features for predicting students' performance with high accuracy. This paper presents different EDM approaches for forecasting students' performance using different data mining techniques. In addition, this paper also presents an evaluation of recent classification algorithms and feature selection algorithms used in educational data mining. Furthermore, the paper will guide the researchers on new and possible dimensions in building a prediction model in EDM.

This bibliometric study on data mining in education synonymous with big educational data utilizes VOSviewer and Harzing’s Publish and Perish to analyze the metadata of 1,439 journal articles found in Scopus from 2010 to 2022. As bibliometric analyses in this field are lacking, this study aims to provide a comprehensive outlook on the current developments and impact of research in this field. This study employs descriptive and trends analysis, co-authorship analysis, co-citation analysis, co-occurrences of keywords, terms map analysis, and analysis of the impact and performance of publications. It also partially replicates a similar study conducted by Wang et al. (2022), who used the Web of Science (WoS) database. The study is reported in an article entitled ‘Big data and data mining in education: A bibliometrics study from 2010 to 2022’. Results show that data mining in education is a growing research field. There is also a significant difference between the publications in Scopus and WoS. The study found several research areas and topics, such as student academic performance prediction, e-learning, machine learning, and innovative data mining techniques, to be the core basis for collaborating and continuing current research in this field. These results highlight the importance of continuing research on data mining in education, guiding future research in tackling educational challenges.

Education can be utilized as a tool to face many problems, overcome many hurdles in life. The knowledge obtained from education helps to enhance opportunities in one's employment development. To extract useful information from the knowledge obtained, Educational Data Mining is widely used. Educational data mining provides the process of applying different data mining tools and techniques to analyze and visualize the data of an institution (school) and can be used to discover a unique pattern of students' academic performance and behavior. The present work intends to enhance students' academic performance in secondary school using data mining techniques. Real data was collected using school reports and questionnaire method by the Portugal school which has been used in this paper. Naive Bayesian algorithm can be easily implemented to predict the students' academic performance and behavior. Classification of students into two classes, pass and fail, involves training phase and testing phase. In training phase, Naive Bayes classifier is built and in the testing phase, Naive Bayes classifier is used to make the prediction. The accuracy of the classifier is calculated using WEKA tool in which confusion matrix is generated. The accuracy of the classifier obtained is 87% which can be further improved by the selection of appropriate attributes. Developing the classification algorithms in this way helps to obtain a more efficient student performance predictor tool using other data mining algorithms and it also helps to improve the quality of education in an educational institution.

Predicting student academic performance has been an important research topic in Educational Data Mining (EDM) which uses machine learning and data mining techniques to explore data from educational settings. However measuring academic performance of students is challenging since students academic performance hinges on diverse factors. The interrelationship between variables and factors for predicting performance participate in complicated nonlinear ways. Traditional data mining and machine learning techniques may not be applied directly to these types of data and problems. In this study we develop a classification model to predict student performance using Deep Learning which automatically learns multiple levels of representation. We pre-train hidden layers of features layerwisely using an unsupervised learning algorithm sparse auto-encoder from unlabeled data, and then use supervised training for finetuning the parameters. We train model on a relatively large real world students dataset, and the experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method which can be applied into academic pre-warning mechanism.

University students face challenges with time management skills and stress that affects academic performance.Furthermore, the lack of awareness and access to resources for healthy sleep patterns is also a major challenge for university students to achieve academic success and overall well-being.The purpose of this study is to perform educational big data mining that analyzes the relationship between sleep management, time management, food management,, mental / mental management and academic performance and to explore the role of friends in mediation through the large ICPSR dataset (originally >90,000 sample size, 42 datasets).The study selected, merged, cleansed, and transformed the most relevant ICPSR datasets 8, 16, and 17.Pearson's correlation and mediation analysis are used to explore the relationship between student life management and academic performance by using SPSS and the PROCESS macro.Mediation analysis revealed that hangout with friends played a significant role as a mediator in the relationship between life management and academic performance.Life management also positively impacts CGPA and significantly reduces the failure rate.The results also state that sleep and time management correlate positively with academic performance, while mental and food management correlate negatively with academic performance.Mental and physical health are important contributors to overall well-being, including academic performance.Therefore, it is important to ensure that both are managed effectively.This study provides insight into the steps involved in large educational data mining, which help the researcher make a decision for future potential data mining research using large datasets.

Data mining methodology can analyze relevant information results and produce different perspectives to understand more about the students' activities. When designing an educational environment, applying data mining techniques discovers useful information that can be used in formative evaluation to assist educators establish a pedagogical basis for taking important decisions. Mining in education environment is called Educational Data Mining. Educational Data Mining is concerned with developing new methods to discover knowledge from educational database and can used for decision making in educational system. In this study, we collected the student's data that have different information about their previous and current academics records and then apply different classification algorithm using Data Mining tools (WEKA) for analysis the student's academics performance for Training and placement. This study presents a proposed model based on classification approach to find an enhanced evaluation method for predicting the placement for students. This model can determine the relations between academic achievement of students and their placement in campus selection.

Student performance is related to complex and correlated factors. The implementation of a new advancement of technologies in educational displacement has unlimited potentials. One of these advances is the use of analytics and data mining to predict student academic accomplishment and performance. Given the existing literature, machine learning (ML) approaches such as Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) can continuously be improved. This work examines and surveys the current literature regarding the ANN methods used in predicting students’ academic performance. This study also attempts to capture a pattern of the most used ANN techniques and algorithms. Of note, the articles reviewed mainly focused on higher education. The results indicated that ANN is always used in combination with data analysis and data mining methodologies, allowing studies to assess the effectiveness of their findings in evaluating academic achievement. No pattern was detected regarding selecting the input variables as they are mainly based on the context of the study and the availability of data. Moreover, the very limited tangible findings referred to the use of techniques in the actual context and target objective of improving student outcomes, performance, and achievement. An important recommendation of this work is to overcome the identified gap related to the only theoretical and limited application of the ANN in a real-life situation to help achieve the educational goals.

Educational data mining is used to convert the randomly available data in educational settings into some beneficial information. It helps in building insights for different research questions that arise in educational settings like performance prediction of students in academics, designing of new courses, instructors’ feedback, method or mode of teaching, etc. This paper aims to answer questions that has been a major challenge for researchers, i.e. the huge list of drop out rate and lower percentage of first-year students. It highlights factors that affect the performance of students. There are a lot of studies that has been conducted in the field education like psychology and statistics. This case study targeted students enrolled in Bachelor of Computer Applications (BCA). The aim of our research work was to show the impact of variables on academic performance of students. The sample size of the study is 480 students of BCA. The questionnaire is based on factors categorized as Demographic, Academic, Social and Behavioural. The results of the study revealed that family income, parents qualification and interaction with teachers were among the influential factors along with previous year percentage, current year attendance and class behaviour.

Educational Data Mining (EDM) is an emerging, promising and interdisciplinary research area, which has an immense impact on student’s academic performance by analyzing educational data for improving teaching, learning experiences and, of course improving the institutional effectiveness. One of the most key facts in educational data is the significant growth of data and these statistics are rising swiftly without any benefit to the institution. In this short study, different studies conducted on the theme “EDM and interdisciplinary” were consulted and examined. Most of the authors have conducted studies on different systems which mostly include e-learning systems, student performance recommender systems (SPRS), conventional educational systems, adaptive and intelligent web based educational systems. The study of the past research has revealed that immense progress has been done in various domains of education and in different phases as well, but there still exists reasonable gap which needs to be examined in details as a future research study. Keywords: Educational Data Mining; Neural Networks; Classification; Association rules; Clustering; Prediction; k-means.

Data Mining is a process of exploring the huge data in search of reliable patterns and methodical relationship among variables. As a result, the findings may be validated through applying the detected patterns to a novel subset of the data. In simple words, Data Mining is referred as extracting the useful information as large dataset and transforming into reliable structure for future use. Data Mining has shown its incredible performance in various fields to a greater extent, out of which, Educational Data Mining (EDM) is one among them. Many researchers have addressed huge number of problems in EDM and applied various techniques to reveal the useful and hidden information that helped in the process of decision making. Students getting employed during and after graduation are one of the important parts of their life. Students, based on their academic performances, are getting employed in companies they deserve. But still, the probability of getting employed is very less in this competitive world. In this paper, a real-time scenario has been chosen for analyzing various factors for getting employed/unemployed. Various clustering and classification techniques have been implemented and their performances are studied. A hybrid approach is presented in this paper that integrates the benefits of particle swarm optimization (PSO) and fuzzy clustering means (FCMs). The results obtained show that the proposed technique helps in obtaining higher accuracy to other clustering techniques. The proposed clustering algorithm PSO-FCM, accuracy is 34.4%, 36.45% and 28.45% higher than the existing method, time complexity shows 45%, 33% and 49% lower than the existing [Formula: see text]-means clustering, Naïve Bayes clustering and SVM clustering algorithms, respectively.

In recent years, educational data mining has emerged as a growing discipline focused on developing models for predicting academic performance. The primary objective of this research was to tune classification models to predict academic performance in secondary school. The dataset employed for this study encompassed information from 19,545 high school students. We used descriptive statistics to characterise information contained in personal, school, and socioeconomic variables. We implemented two data mining techniques, namely artificial neural networks (ANN) and support vector machines (SVM). Parameter optimisation was conducted through five–fold cross–validation, and model performance was assessed using accuracy and F1–Score. The results indicate a functional dependence between predictor variables and academic performance. The algorithms demonstrated an average performance exceeding 80% accuracy. Notably, ANN outperformed SVM in the dataset analysed. This type of methodology could help educational institutions to predict academic underachievement and thus generate strategies to improve students’ academic performance.

This paper illustrates how to use data mining techniques to help in advising students and predicting their academic performance. Data mining is used to get previously unknown, hidden and perhaps vital knowledge from a large amount of data. It combines domain knowledge, advanced analytical skills, and a vast knowledge base to reveal hidden patterns and trends that are applicable in virtually any sector ranging from engineering to medicine, to business. However, it is possible for educational institutes to use data mining to find useful information from their databases. This is usually called Educational Data Mining (EDM). Advancing the field of EDM with new data analysis techniques and new machine learning algorithms is vital. Classification and clustering techniques will be used in this project to study and analyse student performance. The key importance of this project is that it discusses different data mining techniques in the literature review to study student behaviour depending upon their performance. We tried to identify the most suitable algorithms from the existing research methods to predict the success of students. Various data mining approaches were discussed and their results were evaluated. In this paper, the J48 algorithm was applied to the data set, gathered from Umm Al-Qura University in Makkah.