Authors
Karo Castro-Wunsch, Alireza Ahadi, Andrew Petersen
Publication date
2017/3/8
Book
Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE technical symposium on computer science education
Pages
111-116
Description
Course instructors need to be able to identify students in need of assistance as early in the course as possible. Recent work has suggested that machine learning approaches applied to snapshots of small programming exercises may be an effective solution to this problem. However, these results have been obtained using data from a single institution, and prior work using features extracted from student code has been highly sensitive to differences in context. This work provides two contributions: first, a partial reproduction of previously published results, but in a different context, and second, an exploration of the efficacy of neural networks in solving this problem. Our findings confirm the importance of two features (the number of steps required to solve a problem and the correctness of key problems), indicate that machine learning techniques are relatively stable across contexts (both across terms in a single course …
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Scholar articles
K Castro-Wunsch, A Ahadi, A Petersen - Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE technical …, 2017