Coarse-grained detection of student frustration in an introductory programming course
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
2009
Abstract
We attempt to automatically detect student frustration, at a coarse-grained level, using measures distilled from student behavior within a learning environment for introductory programming. We find that each student's average level of frustration across five lab exercises can be detected based on the number of pairs of consecutive compilations with the same edit location, the number of pairs of consecutive compilations with the same error, the average time between compilations and the total number of errors. Attempts to detect frustration at a finer grain-size, identifying individual students' fluctuations in frustration between labs, were less successful. These results indicate that it is possible to detect frustration at a coarse-grained level, solely from coarse-grained data about students' behavior within a learning environment.
Recommended Citation
Ma. Mercedes T. Rodrigo and Ryan S.J.d. Baker. 2009. Coarse-grained detection of student frustration in an introductory programming course. In Proceedings of the fifth international workshop on Computing education research workshop (ICER ’09). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 75–80. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/1584322.1584332
