Modeling student performance in higher education using data mining

Abstract

Identifying students' behavior in university is a great concern to the higher education managements (Kumar and Uma, Eur J Sci Res 34(4):526-534). This chapter proposes a new educational technology system for use in Knowledge Discovery Processes (KDP). We introduce the educational data mining (EDM) software and present the outcome of a test on university data to explore the factors having an impact on the success of the students based on student profiling. In our software system all the tasks involved in the KDP are realized together. The advantage of this approach is to have access to all the functionalities of the Structured Query Language (SQL) Server and the Analysis Services through a single developed software item, which is specific to the needs of a higher education institution. This model (Guruler et al., Comput Educ 55(1):247-254) aims to help educational organizations to better understand the KDPs, and provides a roadmap to follow while executing whole knowledge projects, which are nontrivial, involve multiple stages, possibly several iterations. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.