Data mining in academic retention

Higher education institutions have faced major problems caused by academic retention this problem can be characterized as a delay in the completion of the course by students. In light of this several researchers have dedicated their efforts to finding the causes and preventing academic retention and educational data mining can help in this process. However to obtain satisfactory results with data mining applied to the context of academic retention it is necessary to know the best data mining resources to be used. Thus in this paper a systematic review of the literature was conducted in order to identify the main data mining techniques and tools that can be applied in this process as well as to identify the main factors that induce academic retention.