Chapter9 2 9. Data Mining for Student Performance Prediction in Education

Abstract The ability to predict the performance tendency of students is very important to improve their teaching skills. It has become a valuable knowledge that can be used for different purposes; for example, a strategic plan can be applied for the development of a quality education. This paper proposes the application of data mining techniques to predict the final grades of students based on their historical data. In the experimental studies, three well-known data mining techniques (decision tree, random forest, and naive Bayes) were employed on two educational datasets related to mathematics lesson and Portuguese language lesson. The results showed the effectiveness of data mining learning techniques when predicting the performances of students.