“ Data Mining Icon ” by mcmurryjulie licensed by CC0 Creative Commons Guest Blog Post by Crystal Burns As society spends more time using the vast array of technological devices and tools available, more information is generated digitally about us. Data mining is the field of discovering novel and potentially useful information from large amounts of data. It has been applied in a significant number of areas, including retail sales, bioinformatics, and counter-terrorism. More recently, there has been increasing interest in the use of data mining to investigate scientific questions within educational research, known as educational data mining. In a data-driven world and with the high demand for results and improvements in education, where does educational data mining fit in? What is Data Mining? It is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science defined as the practice of automatically searching large stores of data to discover patterns and trends that go beyond sim