Mining educational data to improve students' performance: a case study

Abstract

Educational data mining concerns with developing methods for discovering knowledge from data that come from educational domain. In this paper we used educational data mining to improve graduate students’ performance, and overcome the problem of low grades of graduate students. In our case study we try to extract useful knowledge from graduate students data collected from the college of Science and Technology–Khanyounis. The data include fifteen years period [1993-2007]. After preprocessing the data, we applied data mining techniques to discover association, classification, clustering and outlier detection rules. In each of these four tasks, we present the extracted knowledge and describe its importance in educational domain.