Using Learning Analytics to Understand the Learning Pathways of Novice Programmers

Many have suggested that tinkering plays a critical role in novices learning to program, and recent work in learning analytics (Baker & Yacef, 2009 Baker, R. S. and Yacef, K. 2009. The state of educational data mining in 2009: A review and future visions. Journal of Educational Data Mining, 1: 3–17. [Google Scholar] Blikstein, 2011) allows us to describe new relationships in the process. Using learning analytics, we explore how students progress from exploration, through tinkering, to refinement, a pathway that we term EXTIRE. The work contributes to learning sciences by: showing empirical support for previously theorized processes; identifying a role of tinkering in novices' learning; and presenting a data-driven approach to creating process descriptions. Furthermore, our findings illuminate how tinkering can be a valuable approach for novices.