A Review on Data Mining Techniques to Predict the Student Performance and Decision Making in Educational Institutions

Abstract

Education is significant as it represents the future of a nation. Most of the Sri Lankan educational institutions utilize manual, paper-based systems to manage information which are more time and money consuming. It also reduces the accuracy and work efficiency. Nowadays the commercial world is fast reacting to the growth and potential in data science and as a result, data mining is getting much attention from many researches at present, and data mining assists to discover patterns within enormous amounts of data, stored in databases and data warehouses. Therefore, adapting these techniques will help to find interesting patterns to predict the student performance and to find the grades of students based on their examination results. Through this review paper, an effort is made to investigate a best data mining technique to quantify the student performance to provide benefits for academic staff, administration staff and students. The prediction on performance will provide more precise results and students may receive more accurate predictions which may help to make important decisions in their careers. Most importantly, this will reduce the workload of the administration and will surmount many challenges pertaining to the scholastic field providing a user-friendly environment