Process-Based Assessment of Computer Science Students

Abstract

Keylogging tools are frequently used to monitor and evaluate writing processes. In this work we propose to use a keylogger to compare advanced and novice computer science students' programming process during experimental sessions. The main goal is to validate if it is possible to estimate how much effort a student requires to solve a specific programming problem. The most significant contributions of this study are: the improvement of an open source keylogging, the implementation of an analysis tool to process and show the collected data in a non-technical way, and the proposal of a new set of indicators for measuring a student's programming effort. The results obtained in the experiments carried out are promising and in many cases confirm the hypotheses.