State Schools Quality Assurance Monitoring System Using Data Mining Technique

Ensuring quality education is seen to be one of the most essential responsibilities that State Education Boards maintain to its schools in order to produce graduates of secondary school students who are higher-education ready and have received relevant knowledge to pursue their chosen careers. This is achieved through monitoring of the schools based on standard sets of formalized features like, methodology of teaching, classifying of students, types of support, educational resources available and fair attention to all students. State school boards will use resources in the form of administrative and academic information, particularly teachers’, staff’s and students’ information, in the various schools they monitor. The management board has an issue of keeping up-to-date as to how their schools are operating. They are also concerned with keeping their schools’ records (students’, teachers’ and staff’s records inclusive) and how these can be conveniently and effectively accessed to keep track of the progress and performance of the schools under their management. The amount of data stored in educational databases is huge and rapidly increasing which makes it more challenging to the board. It is important to maintain these databases that contain records of all concerns of the schools, thus, a system of management is developed to ensure systematic organization and control of these important information. The system utilized data mining, the science of filtering data for information and knowledge retrieval, which has developed a new set of applications and an emerging discipline, called educational data mining. It is concerned with developing methods for discovering useful and valuable knowledge from data found in educational database domains. It would enable organizations to facilitate better resource operation to achieve quality education and improve students’ performance. The system is applied as a case of Katsina State Science and Technical Education Board (KSSTEB). Classification and cluster techniques of data mining were used in this research to evaluate school performances in educating their students and it addresses the applications of information management in the educational sector to extract valuable information from the available data set that will serve as analytical tool to ensure quality education among schools as monitored by state education boards like KSSTEB.