Evaluation of school administrators by using data mining techniques

School leadership is a very important issue in developed countries where school administrators are trained according to the standard that school leadership should have. This thesis applies Data Mining (DM) techniques to evaluate school administrators' perceptions on Believes about the Principal-ship, Generalized Perceived Self-Efficacy, and Melbourne Decision Making. With the help of literature scale, data is collected in order to evaluate these three school administrators' attitudes. Later, the data is used and analysis is performed by applying data mining technique. The school administrators who work in Nigeria and Turkey are selected as the sample group of this thesis. For the evaluation in this thesis, as basic evaluation method of data mining techniques. Firstly, in this studies attitude on occupation questionnaire, generalized self-efficacy questionnaire and Melbourne decision making questionnaire were applied to the school administrators who serve in Nigeria and Turkey. Data Mining is a field comprising many different techniques that can be used to acquire hidden and meaningful information from a large amount of data. In this thesis, the analysis and evaluation are performed by applying data mining methods to the obtained data set. Firstly, classification method is applied to estimate the demographics based on the answers given by school administrators. According to their responses, the administrators are can be estimated based on their country with the scale of 93.38% accuracy rate. Secondly, clustering method is applied to the collected data and 88.97% clustering performance results are obtained. Lastly, the analysis of the data is done by applying association rule method. After applying the association rules, relations between the questionnaire responses are detected. Consequently, many different rules are found with confidence value of 100% and a maximum of 3.76 lift value. This suggests that the obtained rules are interesting and highly reliable. In conclusion, a questionnaire is applied and various attitudes of school administrators are analyzed using data mining techniques and remarkable results are obtained.