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Modeling how students learn to program

Published: 29 February 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Despite the potential wealth of educational indicators expressed in a student's approach to homework assignments, how students arrive at their final solution is largely overlooked in university courses. In this paper we present a methodology which uses machine learning techniques to autonomously create a graphical model of how students in an introductory programming course progress through a homework assignment. We subsequently show that this model is predictive of which students will struggle with material presented later in the class.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE '12: Proceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education
February 2012
734 pages
ISBN:9781450310987
DOI:10.1145/2157136
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 29 February 2012

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Author Tags

  1. hidden Markov model
  2. intelligent tutor
  3. probabilistic graphical models
  4. program dissimilarity metric
  5. student progress model

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SIGCSE '12
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SIGCSE '12: The 43rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
February 29 - March 3, 2012
North Carolina, Raleigh, USA

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SIGCSE '12 Paper Acceptance Rate 100 of 289 submissions, 35%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,595 of 4,542 submissions, 35%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)InsProg: Supporting Teaching Through Visual Analysis of Students’ Programming ProcessesProceedings of the 2024 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces10.1145/3656650.3656668(1-5)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
  • (2024)A Large Scale RCT on Effective Error Messages in CS1Proceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3626252.3630764(1395-1401)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2024
  • (2024)Interpretable Success Prediction in a Computer Networks Curricular Unit Using Machine LearningProcedia Computer Science10.1016/j.procs.2024.06.212239(598-605)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)Investigating Markov Model Accuracy in Representing Student Programming BehavioursSouth African Computer Science and Information Systems Research Trends10.1007/978-3-031-64881-6_4(62-78)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
  • (2023)Mining student coding behaviors in a programming MOOC: there are no actionable learner stereotypesEducational Technology Quarterly10.55056/etq.611Online publication date: 26-Oct-2023
  • (2023)Utilizing Learning Analytics in an Automated Programming Assessment System to Enhance Software Practice EducationPerspectives on Learning Analytics for Maximizing Student Outcomes10.4018/978-1-6684-9527-8.ch017(332-362)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2023
  • (2023)Assessing the Effect of Programming Language and Task Type on Eye Movements of Computer Science StudentsACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/363253024:1(1-38)Online publication date: 14-Nov-2023
  • (2023)The Student Zipf Theory: Inferring Latent Structures in Open-Ended Student Work To Help EducatorsLAK23: 13th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference10.1145/3576050.3576116(464-475)Online publication date: 13-Mar-2023
  • (2023)Detecting the Reasons for Program Decomposition in CS1 and Evaluating Their ImpactProceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3545945.3569763(1014-1020)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2023
  • (2023)Waste Genie: Learning Environmental Sustainability from Waste Sorting and Interactive Feedback2023 IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC)10.1109/GHTC56179.2023.10354701(310-317)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2023
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