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Understanding How Work Habits influence Student Performance

Published: 02 July 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Understanding the relationship between a student's broader work habits and their performance, particularly on open-ended programming assignments, is key towards being able to guide students towards success. In spite of this, most evidence of student behavior and its relationship to performance is anecdotal. The advent of large-scale courses which use online tools for delivering course content, monitoring the programming environment, and providing automatic feedback as well as grading now makes it possible to dive into the data and develop data-driven methods for understanding how a student's approach to an assignment---from their first exposure to the description of the problem to their final submission of their completed assignment---influences their final performance.
This study is a first look at a subset of the data collected from a project-based, online, upper-level course on cloud computing. We examine three raw data streams which include information on the time students spend on reading the project write-up, the timing, grades, and number of submissions they make, and the cloud resources used (both time and cost) in solving the assignment. Using these and several synthetic metrics we were surprised to find that there are few behaviors that are highly correlated to student success. Instead, we find that there is a strong correlation between students who continually apply consistent behaviors over the course of the semester to good final performance in the course. From this we use LASSO to create a predictor (adjusted R2=.48) of final performance based on two kinds of consistency measures across 15 metrics.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ITiCSE '19: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education
July 2019
583 pages
ISBN:9781450368957
DOI:10.1145/3304221
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part 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 components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 02 July 2019

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Author Tags

  1. educational data mining
  2. learning analytics
  3. online education
  4. project-based learning
  5. student performance
  6. work habits

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  • AWS
  • Microsoft
  • Google

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ITiCSE '19
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