Mining Educational Data to Analyze Students’ Performance: A Case Study of Mawuli School, Ho

Abstract

Data mining is the extraction of prospective valuable information from large chunk of data through the employment of many different data mining techniques. The usefulness of data mining coupled with the huge data generated in scholastic settings has made it an interesting field of research known as Educational Data Mining (EDM). The intent of EDM is to derive understanding from hidden patterns in data collected from institutions of learning to aid in identifying issues that influence students’ scholastic accomplishment, to solution of which will lead to improvement in accomplishment. Because scholastic achievement is dependent on several issues, it is essential to develop predictive models on students’ academic performance. This study’s objective, therefore, is to acquire an insight into performance through knowledge discovery by the use of simple linear regression in order to build a predictive model capable of predicting students’ grades to give a general overview of students’ performance in the WASSCE, and help improve students’ performance. In accomplishing the set objective for which the study was carried out, that is to predict the possible outcome of students in WASSCE, a widely sampled study was applied in undertaking the study (Quantitative research).