Data mining is the process of extracting and discovering patterns in large data sets; it can help track academic progress of students while improving the teaching process while having proved to be efficient and effective. It can aid students at-risk of failure by identifying them through the institutions’ data sources. One of the main objectives of educational data mining is to predict the learner’s behaviors by analyzing different characteristics of the student. As a result of educational data mining, the overall experience of an educator and learner can be enhanced as overall teaching effectiveness increases. Educational data mining is often used in researches as an evidential tool such as the study of Beck and Mostow (2004) where the study’s findings consisted of whether re-reading the same story is more or less effective at promoting word learning than encountering the same word in different stories.

In this particular research, Beck and Mostow were also interested in whether there would be differences in individual students; whether they will benefit from a different pattern of practice than the other students. These researchers obtained the data for the performance of each student’s performance in reading each story while using reading time as a continuous measure of the word knowledge. The results of their finding suggested that re-reading a story leads to nearly half as much learning as reading a new story with the same word. With the use of educational data mining to analyze the performance of students, educators were able to predict their learning outcomes.

However, educational data mining has its limitations as shown in the research trend of Educational Data Mining where it states that maximum research focuses only on the academic objectives. Moreover, unlike supervised learning algorithms, there is no way to determine the quality of your results; the data findings are not valid and potentially misleading as well as time-consuming as the data collection process is lengthy and time-taking.

Links:

https://towardsdatascience.com/why-is-educational-data-mining-important-in-the-research-e78ed1a17908 

https://learninganalytics.upenn.edu/ryanbaker/Encyclopedia%20Chapter%20Draft%20v10%20-fw.pdf