Summary: The Importance Of Assessments

One of the biggest challenges that education faces today is how to have an accurate system for assessing students’ performance. Despite the importance of assessments in education today, few teachers receive much formal training in assessment design or analysis. Lacking specific training, teachers rely heavily on the assessments offered by the publisher of their textbooks or instructional materials. When no suitable assessments are available, teachers construct their own in a haphazard fashion, with questions and essay prompts similar to the ones that their teachers used. They treat assessments as evaluation devices to administer when instructional activities are completed and to use primarily for assigning students ' grades. Therefore, there

For example, a classification approach is used (Minaei Bidgoli et al., 2003) to classify students to predict their final year performance based on different parameters derived from the data in an educational web-based system. A clustering algorithm is used (Tsai, Tseng, & Lin, 2009) to categorize students with similar behavioral characteristics. Association rule mining techniques have frequently been used to solve educational problems and carry out critical analysis in an academic environment for improving the learning process of student. These efforts are carried out in order to raise the standards and administration of educational processes by investigating the learning systems, learning resources arrangements, and students’ results, curriculum restructuring, and institutional websites (Damasevicius, 2009; Talavera, & Gaudioso, 2004; Erdogan, & Timor, 2005).

A very comprehensive review of data mining in education from 1995 to 2005 is published in 2007 by Romero and Ventura. One of the educational problems that are solved with data mining is the prediction of students ' academic performances, whose goal is to predict an unknown variable (outcome, grades or scores) that describes students. The estimation of students ' performances includes monitoring and guiding students through the teaching process and

Rule 8 (support = 0.1891, confidence= 0.98) indicates that learners who have medium aptitude in learning English, receive teacher’s very high encouragement for learning English, their score will be 61-80.

Rule 9 (support = 0.1685, confidence= 0.96) indicates that learners who have low interest in communicating with foreigners, very low interest in reading English magazines, their score will be 0-20.

Rule 10 (support = 0.1914, confidence= 0.95) indicates that learners who have very high Interest in the future of employment, low interest in their English teacher, their score will be 41-60.

Rule 11 (support = 0.1952, confidence= 0.95) indicates that learners who have low aptitude in learning English, very high interest in reading English magazines, their score will be 21-40.

Rule 12 (support = 0.1924, confidence= 0.94) indicates that learners who have high interest in gaining the highest score in the International English Language Test, give low importance to aspects of learning English, their score will be