The State of Educational Data Mining in 2009: A Review and Future Visions

We review the history and current trends in the field of Educational Data Mining (EDM). We consider the methodological profile of research in the early years of EDM, compared to in 2008 and 2009, and discuss trends and shifts in the research conducted by this community. In particular, we discuss the increased emphasis on prediction, the emergence of work using existing models to make scientific discoveries ("discovery with models"), and the reduction in the frequency of relationship mining within the EDM community. We discuss two ways that researchers have attempted to categorize the diversity of research in educational data mining research, and review the types of research problems that these methods have been used to address. The most cited papers in EDM between 1995 and 2005 are listed, and their influence on the EDM community (and beyond the EDM community) is discussed.