Discovering the causes of Academic Retention

In recent years higher education institutions have faced major problems caused by academic retention. In light of this, several researchers have dedicated their efforts to discovering 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.