Using learning analytics to assess students’ behavior in open-ended programming tasks

Abstract

There is great interest in assessing student learning in unscripted, open-ended environments, but students’ work can evolve in ways that are too subtle or too complex to be detected by the human eye. In this paper, I describe an automated technique to assess, analyze and visualize students learning computer programming. I logged hundreds of snapshots of students’ code during a programming assignment, and I employ different quantitative techniques to extract students’ behaviors and categorize them in terms of programming experience. First I review the literature on educational data mining, learning analytics, computer vision applied to assessment, and emotion detection, discuss the relevance of the work, and describe one case study with a group undergraduate engineering students