Provision of academic data for research: A step for academic success

Abstract

One of the most widely researched issue on higher education relates to exposed paths that lead to academic success. Nowadays information systems represent an essential part of the education sector in many universities. In particular, the increasing of the number of students in higher education in Portugal leads to the progressive increase of student's data contained in institutional information systems. This article aims to include the use of student data contained in the Fénix information system of a Portuguese higher educational institution, turning their information in an internal tool, to assist analysis and studies of internal academic success. Providing relevant data for queries can offer a clearer explanation of the paths to success in higher education. It can also help the identification of problems and failures aiming to support a more effective intervention of institutions and researchers to improve the academic success.

Assessment Methods Determining the Higher Education Students’ Academic Success

“…When they complete the first phase, they do not have to make assessments in the second phase, usually an exam. As a limitation during the development of this dissertation, it was observed that one of the problems detected when data collection started was the impossibility of knowing whether the grids present in the tool by Miguel et al [19] belonged to one of these phases or the set of both. For this reason, we started from the assumption that all grids were the first phase and it was from this assumption that the averages of each UC were calculated.…”

“…At this stage, it was necessary to proceed to the collection, filtering, and processing of the data. The collection of data related to the averages of the courses between the academic years 2013/2014 and 2017/2018 was obtained through the tool developed in the work described by Miguel, Ramos, Martins and Costa [19] that contained the information regarding the averages of each course in the institution where the investigation took place, among other options. Fig.…”

“…Fig. 1 shows the layout of the tool by Miguel et al [19] that allowed the selection of the respective information. The data were processed using the SPSS Statistics software (v.26) where it was possible to verify if the data were well treated, that is, if they had no wrong values or missing values (Table 1).…”