In this chapter we analyze the application of association rule mining for assessing student academic results and extracting
recommendations for the improvement of course content. We propose a framework for mining educational data using association
rules, and a novel metric for assessing the strength of an association rule, called “cumulative interestingness”. In a case
study, we analyze the Informatics course examination results using association rules, rank course topics following their importance
for final course marks based on the strength of the association rules, and propose which specific course topic should be improved
to achieve higher student learning effectiveness and progress.
Keywords Association rule mining – Education – Academic results – Intelligent data mining