Application of association rules for finding correlations among students preliminary knowledge

Abstract

This paper aims at finding an efficient way for discovering which specific knowledge each student does not possess in order to successfully start a new course or to proceed with another section in a current subject. Most existing tutoring systems respond to students' mistakes by providing links to a collection of teaching materials. Such an approach does the individual needs of each student. Our idea is to apply a holistic approach that involves looking at the whole system of each student knowledge within an subject rather than just concentrating on single mistakes, lack of knowledge or misconception. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.