Data Mining in Education

Data mining techniques are used to extract useful knowledge from raw data. The extracted knowledge is valuable and significantly affects the decision maker. Educational data mining (EDM) is a method for extracting useful information that could potentially affect an organization. The increase of technology use in educational systems has led to the storage of large amounts of student data, which makes it important to use EDM to improve teaching and learning processes. EDM is useful in many different areas including identifying at-risk students, identifying priority learning needs for different groups of students, increasing graduation rates, effectively assessing institutional performance, maximizing campus resources, and optimizing subject curriculum renewal. This paper surveys the relevant studies in the EDM field and includes the data and methodologies used in those studies.