The Design of Academic Programs Using Rough Set Association Rule Mining

Program accreditation is important for determining whether or not a program or institution meets quality standards. It helps employers to evaluate the programs and qualifications of their graduates as well as to achieve its strategic goals and its continuous improvement plans. Preparing for accreditation requires extensive effort. One of the required documents is the program's self-study report (SSR), which includes the PEO-SO map (which allocates the program's educational objectives (PEOs) to student learning outcomes (SOs)). It influences program structure design, performance monitoring, assessment, and continuous improvement. Professionals in each academic engineering program have designed their PEO-SO maps in accordance with their experiences. The problem with the incorrect design of map design is that the SOs are either missing altogether or cannot be assigned to the correct PEOs. The objective of this work is to use a hybrid data mining approach to design the correct PEO-SO map. The proposed hybrid approach utilizes three different data mining techniques: classification to find the similarities between PEOs, crisp association rules to find the crisp rules for the PEO-SO map, and rough set association rules to find the coarse association rules for the PEO-SO map. The work collected 200 SSRs of accredited engineering programs by the ABET-EAC. The paper presents the different phases of the work, such as data collection and preprocessing, building of three data mining models (classification, crisp association rules, and rough set association rules), and analysis of the results and comparison with related work. The validation of the obtained results by different fifty specialists (from the academic engineering field) and their recommendations were also presented. The comparison with other related works proved the success of the proposed approach to discover the correct PEO-SO maps with higher performance.