Leveraging Trends in Student Interaction to Enhance the Effectiveness of Sketch-Based Educational Software Chapter uri icon

abstract

  • With the rapid adoption of software-based learning in classrooms, it is increasingly important to design more intelligent educational software, a goal of the emerging field of educational data mining. In this work, we analyze student activities from using a learning tool for engineers, Mechanix, in order to find trends that may be used to make the software a better tutor, combining its natural, sketch-based input with intelligent, experience-based feedback. We see a significant correlation between student performance and the amount of time they work on a problem before submitting; students who attempt to game the system by submitting their results too often perform worse than those who work longer (p< 0.05). We also found significance in the number of times a student attempted a problem before moving on, with a strong correlation between being willing to switch among problems and better performance (p< 0.05). Overall, we find that student trends like these could be paired with machine learning techniques to make more intelligent educational tools.

author list (cited authors)

  • Polsley, S., Ray, J., Nelligan, T., Helms, M., Linsey, J., & Hammond, T.

citation count

  • 5

complete list of authors

  • Polsley, Seth||Ray, Jaideep||Nelligan, Trevor||Helms, Michael||Linsey, Julie||Hammond, Tracy

editor list (cited editors)

  • Hammond, T., Valentine, S., & Adler, A.

Book Title

  • Revolutionizing Education with Digital Ink: The Impact of Pen and Touch Technology on Education

publication date

  • January 2016