Knowledge system for dropout prevention

About 9 per cent of the students in Israel drop out of school. Attendance officers, who are appointed to enforce education attendance laws, and other decision makers have to deal with many dropout cases with limited resources, leading to sub optimal or even wrong solutions. In contrast, creative, successful solutions adopted by one attendance officer, are not shared by others, since there is no system (manual or computational) that accumulates knowledge. In this work, we present a knowledge management model, developed for supporting attendance officers, that is based on problem solving according to precedents. The model was tested in lab settings with 12 attendance officers, each solving 6 problems, and was found to have remarkable potential for improving attendance officers' work and their understanding and perception of their work. The system developed is easy to use and can be easily deployed in real settings.