Mining Course Trajectories of Successful and Failure Students: A Case Study

Educational data mining (EDM) is an emerging interdisciplinary research area that uses computational approaches to answer education related questions. This study uses sequential pattern mining to solve two important problems in education: identifying course trajectories students take to earn an academic degree and discovering specific courses which may influence students' likelihood to divert from their original academic and career. For this study, we analyzed students in computer science and their course enrollment data, which was extracted from the Banner system at a public university. The preliminary results of the case study demonstrate the usefulness of sequential pattern mining in solving problems that are of interest to students, educators and administrators in post-secondary schools.