Identifying patterns of learning : a case study of MIT's Introductory Programming Course (6.000x)

The ever-increasingly relevant introductory programming course offered at MIT presents a unique opportunity to uncover student learning patterns and common behavioral motifs. The course 6.0001/6.0002 harbors a wealth of student interaction data on its companion MITx platform as well as associated grades. Although this course has been offered for the last twelve years, since 2008, little has been done to identify aspects of the course that best aid or hinder student success. This thesis will focus on finding various learner subpopulations to elucidate those materials that best aid certain students to allow for a more tailored teaching mode for future iterations of the course. In addition, this thesis will define an 'effort' statistic that encompasses the holistic engagement of a given student in order to provide an additional statistic to use when determining final grades. I begin with a course specific analysis of enrollment demonstrating the significance of this type of analysis.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Abadiotakis, Helen.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Ana Bell.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/128986

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/128986