A Systematic Review on Process Mining for Curricular Analysis

Educational Process Mining (EPM) is a data analysis technique that is used to improve educational processes. It is based on Process Mining (PM), which involves gathering records (logs) of events to discover process models and analyze the data from a process-centric perspective. One specific application of EPM is curriculum mining, which focuses on understanding the learning program students follow to achieve educational goals. This is important for institutional curriculum decision-making and quality improvement. Therefore, academic institutions can benefit from organizing the existing techniques, capabilities, and limitations. We conducted a systematic literature review to identify works on applying PM to curricular analysis and provide insights for further research. From the analysis of 22 primary studies, we found that results can be classified into five categories concerning the objectives they pursue: the discovery of educational trajectories, the identification of deviations in the observed behavior of students, the analysis of bottlenecks, the analysis of stopout and dropout problems, and the generation of recommendation. Moreover, we identified some open challenges and opportunities, such as standardizing for replicating studies to perform cross-university curricular analysis and strengthening the connection between PM and data mining for improving curricular analysis.