Data driven decision making in chemistry first year subjects

Analytics is not a new area of endeavour with many industries and other professions being well ahead of the education sector in the uptake of advanced analytics methods and tools (Abdous, He, & Yen, 2012; Dziuban, Moskal, Cavanagh, & Watts, 2012). Wagner and Ice (2012) describe higher education as being on the early side of the analytics adoption curve when compared to retail, telecommunications, financial services and manufacturing. Analytics is often used in higher education institutions to identify and also predict individual students who may be 'at risk' (Fritz, 2011).