This paper presents a data mining model for predicting student performance in a programming course based on
their performance in English and mathematics courses. The Classification Based on Association rules (CBA)
algorithm was used to build a classification model for predicting students’ performance. As its subject, the study
used the academic records of mathematics students who graduated from King Saud University (KSU) between 2008
and 2014.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 contains background information on DM in higher
education and classification association rules for DM. Section 3 introduces some related research. Section 4
proposes overall work that can be used for educational DM research. Section 5 presents the main idea behind the
project, a case study proposing an application to predict students’ performance in a programming course based on
their performance in mathematics and English courses. Section 6 summarizes the results. Section 7 presents
discussion and conclusions.