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Crossing the Streams: Exploring the Interplay between Students' Online Social Activity and Programming Behavior (Abstract Only)

Published: 17 February 2016 Publication History

Abstract

With the widespread availability of massive amounts of student programming data, we are witnessing a digital gold rush as researchers attempt to make sense of students' programming behaviors. In prior research, we incorporated programming data into a statistical model that accounted for a significant amount of a student's course performance. In a separate line of research, we explored how online social networking tools might be leveraged for pedagogical purposes. Rather than treating our explorations of students' programming and social behaviors as separate research spaces, we are next considering the interplay between social behavior, programming behavior, and course performance. As a first step, we incorporated online social participation into our statistical model of programming behaviors. The outcome was quite promising: we witnessed a 30% increase in our model's effect size. This result would seem to indicate that neither programming behavior nor social behavior alone can fully account for student performance.
Encouraged by this result, we are now considering how social interaction influences programming decisions and vice versa. In particular:
After receiving help on a social network, what changes are made to code? Are these changes more or less likely to move the student closer to a correct solution?
How do students address coding problems when their questions are left unanswered?
At what points in the programming process are students more likely to pose questions? Similarly, when are students more willing to offer help?
How can we use this knowledge to better identify students who are struggling?

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE '16: Proceedings of the 47th ACM Technical Symposium on Computing Science Education
February 2016
768 pages
ISBN:9781450336857
DOI:10.1145/2839509
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 17 February 2016

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Author Tags

  1. programming behavior
  2. social networking

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  • National Science Foundation

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SIGCSE '16
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Acceptance Rates

SIGCSE '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 105 of 297 submissions, 35%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,595 of 4,542 submissions, 35%

Upcoming Conference

SIGCSE TS 2025
The 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
February 26 - March 1, 2025
Pittsburgh , PA , USA

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