Universities mine data to improve student performance

Chronicle of Higher Education : When Eric Mazur saw in 1991 that his Harvard physics class couldn’t apply his lecture on Newton’s laws to real-life problems, he realized that many traditional teaching methods are ineffective. Thus he began gathering information on his students to improve his pedagogical techniques. Such data mining is now beginning to be used by administrators at the university and college level to improve the admissions process, the teaching of courses, and student advising. By gathering statistics on prospective and current students, officials say, they can better determine which schools would be a good fit and even predict a student’s success or failure in a given class. Students are also starting to use the new data-based tools to choose courses and majors and even to decide whom to pair up with for a group project. In this Chronicle of Higher Education article, writer Marc Parry discusses some of the various methods being developed at universities across the US.