Play Your Cards Right
James Finnie-Ansley, Paul C. Denny, Andrew Luxton-Reilly · Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education · 2022
In order to transfer problem solving knowledge effectively across tasks, students must be able to identify when two problems can be solved in similar ways. As instructors, it is helpful to know how well students can identify such similarities. Unfortunately, current efforts to understand how students categorise similar problems are laborious and time-consuming, involving intensive data collection and analysis. Our own prior work on analysing student categorisations of simple algorithmic patterns involved 35 hour-long interviews and time-consuming open coding of the resulting transcripts. It is clear that traditional approaches to elicit such knowledge are not scalable or reproducible.