  The growing popularity of data mining catalyses the researchers to explore
various exciting aspects of education. Early prediction of student performance
is an emerging area among them. The researchers have used various predictors in
performance modelling studies. Although prior cognition can affect student
performance, establishing their relationship is still an open research
challenge. Quantifying the knowledge from readily available data is the major
challenge here. We have proposed a semantic approach for this purpose.
Association mining on nearly 0.35 million observations establishes that prior
cognition impacts the student performance. The proposed approach of measuring
domain knowledge can help the early performance modelling studies to use it as
a predictor.
