“…One of those procedures is the so-called association rules , one of the most commonly used and best known Data Mining techniques ( Romero et al, 2010a ) in very different research disciplines such as medicine ( Antonie et al, 2001 ), earth sciences ( Tan et al, 2001 ), banking ( Aburrous et al, 2010 ), telecommunications ( Wei and Chiu, 2002 ), and the stock-market ( Hajizadeh et al, 2010 ), and also in the educational field. This methodology has been extensively used to identify e-learning indicators and their influence on student performance ( Paule-Ruiz et al, 2015 ), describe learning behavioral profiles ( Goda et al, 2015 ), point out variables that influence instruction ( Romero et al, 2010a ), to improve a collaborative learning experience ( Mora et al, 2014 ), to test 3D virtual reality environments ( Cherenkova et al, 1996 ), to understand the role of social networks in learning ( Paredes and Chung, 2012 ), and as the basis of adaptive learning systems ( Murugananthan and ShivaKumar, 2016 ). Based on this body of previous research, and as Han already concluded in 2001, it seems as though this methodology could produce enough knowledge to discover patterns from a huge amount of data which would be a useful base for a decision-making process ( Han and Kamber, 2001 ).…”