Data Science Applications

in Education
 1. Social-emotional skills
Education is essential for developing social-emotional skills. This teaches
children how to analyze, understand, express, manage and control
emotions. The child also learns to build relationships with others.
Educational institutes have a crucial task in facilitating social-emotional
growth. This skill is a non-academic one that can help students develops
their learning abilities.
There were previously several statistical surveys that could assess these
social-emotional abilities. It is now possible to collect large amounts of
data due to the advances in computational methods.
Combining large amounts of information with existing tools is possible
using the formalized knowledge discovery models in Data Science or
Data Mining techniques.
Data scientists can also use the extracted data to develop predictive
analytics techniques that will help teachers understand students’
motivations to teach the course.
 2. Monitoring student requirements
Educational institutes can use a variety of evaluation and assessment
methods. These traditional methods could not always capture all the
important patterns and trends in student services.
Many of the assessment methods were not available in real-time. The
advancements in Big Data analytics allow teachers to analyze student
needs based on performance and reviews.
Teachers can monitor student needs and adjust their teaching methods
to accommodate student expectations. Teachers often have unconscious
biases towards certain students.
Data platforms will have zero bias and will evaluate student
performance without bias. This will ensure that all students have equal
access to the platform and allow them to develop their skills.
 3. Innovative Curriculum Design
Diverse Universities must keep up with industry demands to offer
appropriate courses to students. It is also difficult for universities to
keep up with the pace of the industry’s growth.

To accommodate this, universities use Data Science systems to analyze

market trends.

Data science is a method that uses various monitoring and statistical

methods to analyze industrial patterns. It can also help course creators
learn useful topics.
 4. Measuring instructor performance
Teachers are the most important factor in students’ performance.
Although there are many methods to evaluate teachers’ performance, it
is mostly manual.
Student reviews on teachers’ performance have been a standard way to
quantify teaching methods.
All these methods are slow and inefficient. It can be tedious to read
student reviews and create an analogy.
Data science has made it possible to track teacher performance. This
applies not only to recorded data but also to real-time data. With real-
time monitoring by teachers, it is possible to collect and analyze
rigorous data.
We can also store and manage unstructured data on a big-data
platform, such as student reviews. With Natural Language Processing,
it’s possible to analyze reviews and give a complete analysis of teacher
performance.
 Data Science Case Study
University of Florida – Big Data Analytics Used to Reduce Student
Dropout
A college education is considered a pathway to success. Many college
students go to college in hopes of pursuing a career. Many students
leave college because of financial or academic difficulties.
A recent study in the United States found that at least 54.8% will not be
able to complete their degree within six years. This shocking percentage
will limit the availability of qualified workers for certain industries. This
will also hinder national growth.
Education institutes are turning to Data Science to address this problem.
The University of Florida is one such institute. IBM InfoSphere is used by
the University to extract, load, and transfer data from multiple sources.
 Data Science Case Study
The IBM SPSS Modeler is also used for data modeling and predictive
analytics. These two platforms are aligned with IBM Cognos Analytics.

IBM Cognos provides powerful web-based business intelligence tools

that monitor, report, and analyze events using interactive visualizations.
The University can analyze and predict student performance using IBM
Cognos Analytics.

It uses variables such as demographics, student background, and high

school grades to determine the likelihood of students dropping out. It
will assist the University in developing its policies and offering early
intervention to students at risk of dropping out.
 Data Science Case Study – Georgia State University

Georgia State University (GSU) in the United States, has used various
Data Science and Machine Learning tools for mining insights from the
student data. This helps them to track the courses in which the
performance of the students was not up to the mark. It leads to
developing a backup program to deal with the cause behind this to
improve student performance.

Taking the right decisions based on their analysis helped them in a

remarkable way and they realized that their graduation rate has grown
from 32% to 54% between the years 2003 and 2014. They also utilized
the student data for dealing with the issues of student retention and
course completion.
 Data Science Case Study – Arizona State University
Another case is Arizona State University (ASU) which is considered to be
one of the top American universities. The mathematics department of
ASU has developed a system called “Adaptive Learning” based on the
analysis of student data. So that they can take suitable actions for the
improvement of student performance.
The developed system collected various data related to students such as
their marks, strengths, weaknesses, cultural areas of interest as well as
the scenarios in which they hesitate.
The Advisor of ASU combined the information extracted by the system
with the registration details and other previous records of the student.
This will help them in such a way that they will get a notification
whenever the performance of the student starts going off track so that
desired actions can be taken before any major harm.
After the implementation of this system, there was a considerable
improvement in the success rate of the students and also the dropout
rate of students got decreased by around 5.4%.