Gaining insights from the benchmark Student Performance Data Set
This is a comprehensive dataset designed to assess and understand student achievement in the context of secondary education within Portuguese schools. This dataset offers a variety of information, including student grades, demographic features, social characteristics, and school-related attributes, all collected through school reports and questionnaires. It facilitates various analytical approaches, including regression tasks for predicting student performance and classification tasks. Of particular relevance is the dataset's emphasis on the final year grade, which shows a strong correlation with earlier period grades; it also includes a combination of numeric and categorical attributes, providing a diverse range of variables to explore. With 33 features and 629 instances, this dataset offers a rich resource for researchers, educators, and data analysts seeking to investigate and enhance the educational outcomes of secondary school students in the domains of Mathematics and Portuguese language.
Example:
An educational researcher interested in understanding factors that influence student performance in secondary education, can access this dataset and employ it to perform a regression analysis to predict student performance based on various attributes such as demographic details, grades in prior periods, social factors, and school-related features. By analyzing this dataset, the features that have the most significant impact on student achievement can be identified and new insights into potential areas for intervention and improvement can be obtained.
Reference:
Cortez, P. and Silva, A., Using Data Mining to Predict Secondary School Student Performance, Proceedings of 5th Future Business Technology Conference, (2008 ): 5-12.
Author of the tip:
Florbela P. Fernandes
Instituto Politécnico de Bragança