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Week 8

Essential Question: How can data mining assist you in triangulating your research findings?

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“Educational Data Mining (EDM) is an emerging discipline which seeks to develop methods to explore large amounts of data from educational settings, in order to understand students’ behavior, interests and results in a better way” (Villanueva et al., 2018, p. 235).

The literature review by Villanueva et al. (2018, p. 237), states there are four phases of data mining, giving credit to Virseda Benito and Carrillo (2008). The four phases are:

  1. Filtering data.
  2. Selection of variables.
  3. Extracting knowledge.
  4. Interpretation and evaluation. 

Data mining can assist me in triangulating my research findings because it gives me the opportunity to look at a large amount of information and break it down into digestible chunks of data. Through the process I am encouraged to look at all the multiple sources or approaches to analyzing data and narrow it down into just the variables I want to explore. Data mining teaches me to look for trends and patterns within my data and to properly interpret the results in order to increase the validity of my study.


Resources:
Villanueva, A., Moreno, L.G., Salinas, M.J. (2018). Data mining techniques applied in educational environments … Retrieved from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1183658.pdf

Virseda Benito, F., & Carrillo, J. (2008). Minería de datos y aplicaciones (p. 8)

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