Samiha Marwan

Alex Hicks, Yang Shi, Arun-Balajiee Lekshmi-Narayanan et al.

Students interactions while solving problems in learning environments (i.e. log data) are often used to support students learning. For example, researchers use log data to develop systems that can provide students with personalized problem recommendations based on their knowledge level. However, anomalies in the students log data, such as cheating to solve programming problems, could introduce a hidden bias in the log data. As a result, these systems may provide inaccurate problem recommendations, and therefore, defeat their purpose. Classical cheating detection methods, such as MOSS, can be used to detect code plagiarism. However, these methods cannot detect other abnormal events such as a student gaming a system with multiple attempts of similar solutions to a particular programming problem. This paper presents a preliminary study to analyze log data with anomalies. The goal of our work is to overcome the abnormal instances when modeling personalizable recommendations in programming learning environments.

Yang Shi, Krupal Shah, Wengran Wang et al.

Understanding students' misconceptions is important for effective teaching and assessment. However, discovering such misconceptions manually can be time-consuming and laborious. Automated misconception discovery can address these challenges by highlighting patterns in student data, which domain experts can then inspect to identify misconceptions. In this work, we present a novel method for the semi-automated discovery of problem-specific misconceptions from students' program code in computing courses, using a state-of-the-art code classification model. We trained the model on a block-based programming dataset and used the learned embedding to cluster incorrect student submissions. We found these clusters correspond to specific misconceptions about the problem and would not have been easily discovered with existing approaches. We also discuss potential applications of our approach and how these misconceptions inform domain-specific insights into students' learning processes.

Ge Gao, Samiha Marwan, Thomas W. Price

Instructors have limited time and resources to help struggling students, and these resources should be directed to the students who most need them. To address this, researchers have constructed models that can predict students' final course performance early in a semester. However, many predictive models are limited to static and generic student features (e.g. demographics, GPA), rather than computing-specific evidence that assesses a student's progress in class. Many programming environments now capture complete time-stamped records of students' actions during programming. In this work, we leverage this rich, fine-grained log data to build a model to predict student course outcomes. From the log data, we extract patterns of behaviors that are predictive of students' success using an approach called differential sequence mining. We evaluate our approach on a dataset from 106 students in a block-based, introductory programming course. The patterns extracted from our approach can predict final programming performance with 79% accuracy using only the first programming assignment, outperforming two baseline methods. In addition, we show that the patterns are interpretable and correspond to concrete, effective -- and ineffective -- novice programming behaviors. We also discuss these patterns and their implications for classroom instruction.