Data Mining Techniques for Student Performance Enhancement

Abstract

Data Mining (Data Knowledge Discovery) is the practice of examining large pre-existing databases in order to identify patterns, establishing relationships and to generate the new understandable and useful information. newlineData mining in educational field is a new emerging field that concerns about applying data mining methods and algorithms on data residing in educational system repositories. It can be used for the purpose of discovering valuable knowledge such as learning environment, students performance, and identification of circumstances under which students can do dropout or come under risk of poor performance. newlineEnormous efforts has been done by the researchers to analyze student s performance using data mining techniques, and in proposed work we extended their work and attempt to contribute for betterment of educational processes. This study predicts the academic performance of students through a model that analyzes students transactional data. It identifies the factors, which influences students academic performance. This prediction model helps teachers, mentors and management to uplift student s skills and educational performance due to early projection. In addition, the prediction model can be used by management to design special program for the outstanding and the low achievers for the course. In this way, students who are expected to do well could be pushed to get the excellent level. On the other hand, students who are expected to be low achievers could be assisted to gain better grades upon graduation. This ensures the quality of graduates and other progress in a positive direction. newlineIn this study, massive information can be collected from students data in order to produce knowledge. The students data such as academic information, demographic information and learning behaviour collected from various institutes by applying the various data collection methodology such as preparing questionnaires, Google spreadsheet by making a web site. After that we applied pre-processing and transforming techniq