educare: a decision support system for anticipating behaviors among educational actors Cláudia Antunes Instituto Superior Técnico, Av Rovisco Pais, 1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal
[email protected] Abstract. Decision support systems play a core role in data management, due to its ability to provide the tools needed to help in the decision making process. Education is just another application field, where those systems may contribute to assist in its improvement. The educare project aims to design a decision support system, specifically created for enabling the discovery of hidden information about students and teachers performance. Keywords: Decision support systems, Educational data mining, Multi- dimensional model for education 1 Introduction The educational process produces amounts of data, which can and should be used to understand its actors’ behaviors and to identify failure and success causes. Despite data is collected for years, even in digital storages, education poses a set of particular challenges in respect to data analysis and information discovery. Educational Data Mining (EDM) [1] is an emerging discipline with the goal of applying DM (DM) techniques to data that come from educational settings, like computer-based tutoring systems or the traditional teaching process. In either cases, data hide students’ usual behaviors, process definitions and coordination, teaching strategies and so on. In all these cases, data are framed in a particular and well- defined context, which can and should be used to better understand the data. The reason for creating a dedicated discipline results from the identification of a set of peculiarities that characterize educational data, in particular: the temporality of records, the impact of previous events (data) on the results that occur in the future, and the impact of the context on behaviors.