Supporting differentiated instruction in programming classes through permanent progress monitoring

Authors

Abstract

Several studies showed that teacher’s support is essential to the students learning process. Often it is difficult for teachers to follow all their student’s evolution and make timely interventions when needed. Often in the same class, there are students with substantially different performance levels, and many times a teacher intervention is crucial to help lower performing students. To help the teacher identify these students, we propose the use of CodeInsights, a tool able to capture autonomously and unobtrusively real-time information about the students’ performance based on snapshots of their code. The information available can be used by the teachers to support the adoption of the necessary measures to address each student needs or difficulties in a more grounded manner. We present the system and some results of a field test involving students from an introductory course on PHP programming.

Keywords

differentiated instruction; programming, performance monitoring, working pace

Conference

SIGCSE 2018, February 2018