Abstract
Online programming discussion forums have grown increasingly and have formed sizable repositories of problem solving-solutions. In this paper, we investigate programming learners’ information seeking behaviors from online discussion forums. We design engines to collect students’ information seeking processes, including query formulation, refinement, results examination, and reading processes. We model these behaviors and conduct sequence pattern mining. The results show that programming learners indeed seek for programming related information from discussion forums by actively searching on the site and reading posts progressively according to course schedule topics. Advanced students consistently perform query refinements, examine search results and commit to read, however, novices do not. In addition, advanced students commit to read posts, but novices only skim.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages | 442-447 |
Number of pages | 6 |
State | Published - Jan 1 2016 |
Event | 9th International Conference on Educational Data Mining, EDM 2016 - Raleigh, United States Duration: Jun 29 2016 → Jul 2 2016 |
Conference
Conference | 9th International Conference on Educational Data Mining, EDM 2016 |
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Country/Territory | United States |
City | Raleigh |
Period | 6/29/16 → 7/2/16 |
Keywords
- Discussion Forums
- Hidden Markov Model
- Information Seeking
- Programming
- Sequential pattern mining
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Computer Science Applications
- Information Systems