Adaptive testing in programming courses based on educational data mining techniques

Abstract

Designers of student tests, often teachers, primarily rely on their experience and subjective perception of students when selecting test items, while devoting little time to analyse factual data about both students and test items. As a practical solution to this common issue, we propose an approach to automatic test generation that acknowledges required areas of competence and matches the overall competence level of target students. The proposed approach, which is tailored to the testing practice in an introductory university course on programming, is based on the use of educational data mining. Data about students and test items are first evaluated using the predictive techniques of regression and classification, respectively, and then used to guide the test creation process. Besides a genetic algorithm that selects a test most suitable to the aforementioned criteria, we present a concept map of programming competencies and a method of estimating the test item difficulty.