Seeking programming-related information from large scaled discussion forums, help or harm?

Yihan Lu, I. Han Hsiao

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

16 Scopus citations

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 languageEnglish (US)
Pages442-447
Number of pages6
StatePublished - Jan 1 2016
Event9th International Conference on Educational Data Mining, EDM 2016 - Raleigh, United States
Duration: Jun 29 2016Jul 2 2016

Conference

Conference9th International Conference on Educational Data Mining, EDM 2016
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityRaleigh
Period6/29/167/2/16

Keywords

  • Discussion Forums
  • Hidden Markov Model
  • Information Seeking
  • Programming
  • Sequential pattern mining

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Information Systems

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