A Method to Describe Student Learning Status for Personalized Computer Programming e-Learning Environment

Abstract

Personalized e-learning environment is desirable in computer programming education. An important issue on personalized e-learning environment is to know the learning status of each student. This article proposes a method, SKP based Student Learning Status Description(SKP-based SLSD), to help instructors to know student individual's learning status in C programming. SKP-based SLSD focus on the syntactic knowledge called Syntax Knowledge Point(SKP) extracted from program source code. Firstly, it gathers all syntactic knowledge that should be learned by the students by extracting SKP from the source code in teaching materials or exercises' model answers. Then, for each student, it collects his learning activities on each SKP by extracting SKP from the source code the student have read or taught at lectures and wrote at exercises or tests. Finally, for each student, his understanding of each SKP is estimated based on the collected data. Student learning status can be described by his understanding of all SKPs. By SKP-based SLSD, the information used to describe student learning status can be more detail, be better-defined and better-handled by computer systems. We have also conducted experiments and proved that SKP-based SLSD is effective and feasible.