Investigation of Student Performance with Contextual Factors Using Association Rules in Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs)

Abstract

Association rules provide an important clue on how hidden knowledge and patterns can be extracted and the attributes extracted are associated when big data is mined by means of a particular data mining algorithm. The context of HEIs, where big data mining is uncommon, there is a need to know how association rules could be utilized to discover hidden knowledge and forecast student performance based on time-to-degree and cumulative grade point average (CGPA) and also make decisions. This research has demonstrated this by taking the example of the dataset of 337 graduated students of a university in Bahrain belonging to the Bachelor's degree in Accounting and Finance. Two types of data mining concepts were applied, regression and a priori algorithm. Regression results showed that there is a statistically substantial link between time-to-degree and course-difficulty and not CGPA. Similarly, association rules showed the link between time-to-degree, course-taking pattern, no. of courses and course-difficulty pattern but not CGPA. The association rules generated provided the basis to predict optimum time-to-degree by controlling the no. of courses, course-taking pattern, and course-taking difficulty. The findings of this research provide an important window of opportunity for HEIs to enhance student performance using data mining techniques. This investigation has contributed theoretically showing the application of data mining theory using apriori algorithm and regression, for HEI big data mining where student factors and organizational factors are said to be fairly different from that of the HEIs where research on big data is seen to be a well-known activity.