Educational Data Mining

This book is devoted to the Educational Data Mining arena. It highlights works that show relevant proposals, developments, and achievements that shape trends and inspire future research. After a rigorous revision process sixteen manuscripts were accepted and organized into four parts as follows:

· Profile: The first part embraces three chapters oriented to: 1) describe the nature of educational data mining (EDM); 2) describe how to pre-process raw data to facilitate data mining (DM); 3) explain how EDM supports government policies to enhance education.

· Student modeling: The second part contains five chapters concerned with: 4) explore the factors having an impact on the student's academic success; 5) detect student's personality and behaviors in an educational game; 6) predict students performance to adjust content and strategies; 7) identify students who will most benefit from tutor support; 8) hypothesize the student answer correctness based on eye metrics and mouse click.

· Assessment: The third part has four chapters related to: 9) analyze the coherence of student research proposals; 10) automatically generate tests based on competences; 11) recognize students activities and visualize these activities for being presented to teachers; 12) find the most dependent test items in students response data.

· Trends: The fourth part encompasses four chapters about how to: 13) mine text for assessing students productions and supporting teachers; 14) scan student comments by statistical and text mining techniques; 15) sketch a social network analysis (SNA) to discover student behavior profiles and depict models about their collaboration; 16) evaluate the structure of interactions between the students in social networks.

This volume will be a source of interest to researchers, practitioners, professors, and postgraduate students aimed at updating their knowledgeand find targets for future work in the field of educational data mining.

Part I: Profile

1 Which Contribution Does EDM Provide to Computer Based Learning Environments?

Nabila Bousbia, Idriss Belamri

2 A Survey on Pre-processing Educational Data

Cristóbal Romero, José Raúl Romero, Sebastián Ventura

3 How Educational Data Mining Empowers Government Policies to Re-form Education: The Mexican Case Study

Alejandro Peña-Ayala, Leonor Cárdenas

Part II: Student Modeling

4 Modeling Student Performance in Higher Education Using Data Mining

Huseyin Guruler, Ayhan Istanbullu

5 Using Data Mining Techniques to Detect the Personality of Players in an Educational Game

Fazel Keshtkar, Candice Burkett, Haiying Li, Arthur C. Graesser

6 Students' Performance Prediction using Multi-Channel Decision Fusion

H. Moradi, S. Abbas Moradi, L. Kashani

7 Predicting Student Performance from Combined Data Sources

Annika Wolff, Zdenek Zdrahal, Drahomira Herrmannova, Petr Knoth

8 Predicting Learner Answers Correctness Through Eye Movements With Random Forest

Alper Bayazit, Petek Askar, Erdal Cosgun

Part III: Assessment

9 Mining Domain Knowledge for CoherenceAssessment of Students Proposal Drafts

Samuel González López, Aurelio López-López

10 Adaptive Testing in Programming Courses Based on Educational Data Mining Techniques

Vladimir Ivancevic, Marko Knezevic, Bojan Pusic, Ivan Lukovic

11 Plan Recognition and Visualization in Exploratory Learning Environments

Ofra Amir, Kobi Gal, David Yaron, Michael Karabinos, Robert Bel-ford

12 Dependency of Test Items from Students' Response Data

Xiaoxun Sun

Part IV : Trends

13 Mining Texts, Learner Productions and Strategies with ReaderBench

Mihai Dascalu, Philippe Dessus, Maryse Bianco, Stefan Trausan-Matu, Aurélie Nardy

14 Maximizing the Value of Student Ratings Through Data Mining

Kathryn Gates, Dawn Wilkins, Sumali Conlon, Susan Mossing, Mau-rice Eftink

15 Data Mining and Social Network Analysis in the Educational Field: An Application for Non-expert Users

Diego García-Saiz, Camilo Palazuelos, Marta Zorrilla

16 Collaborative Learning of Students in Online Discussion Forums: A Social Network Analysis Perspective

Reihaneh Rabbany, Samira ElAtia, Mansoureh Takaffoli, Osmar R. Zaïane