Fw: January Student Modeling Reading Meeting! [01.31]

[Shaffer, Cliff]

FYI — A paper reading group on student modeling. I'm not sure yet if this is an evolution of the LLM reading group, or separate.

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Dr. Cliff Shaffer                                               

Professor
Department of Computer Science              Phone: (540) 231-4354
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061          WWW: www.cs.vt.edu/~shaffer

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From: 'Lekshmi Narayanan, Arun Balajiee' via Student Modeling Reading Meeting
Sent: Monday, March 24, 2025 11:32 AM
To: Student Modeling Reading Meeting
Cc: Benyamin T. Tabarsi
Subject: Re: January Student Modeling Reading Meeting! [01.31]

Hi Everyone,

We invite you the Student Modeling and Personalization Reading Group meeting Mar 28 2025 Friday 10 am ET. We have Benyamin Tabarsi presenting on the following topic this Friday, more details will be shared on Thursday.

Title: Scaffolding Novices: Analyzing When and How Parsons Problems Scaffolding Novices: Analyzing When and How Parsons Problems Impact Novice Programming in an Integrated Science Assignment

Abstract:The importance of CS to 21st-century life and work has made it important to find ways to integrate learning CS and programming into the regular school day. However, learning CS is difficult, so teachers integrating programming need effective strategies to scaffold the learning. In this study, we analyze students’ log data and apply a novel technique to compare Parsons Problems with from-scratch programming in a middle school science class. Objectives. Our research questions aimed to investigate whether, how, and when Parsons Problems improve learning efficiency for a programming exercise within science, utilizing log data analysis and an automated progress detector (SPD). Method. We conducted a study on 199 students in a 6th-grade science course, divided into two groups: one engaged with Parsons problems, and the other, a control group, worked on the same programming task without scaffolding. Then, we analyzed differences in performance and coding characteristics between the groups. We also adopted an innovative application of SPD to gain a better understanding of how and when Parsons problems helped students make more progress on the coding task, with an objective measure of final student grades. Findings. The experimental group, with scaffolding through Parsons Problems, achieved significantly higher grades, spent significantly less time programming, and toggled less between block category tabs. Interestingly, they ran their code more frequently compared to the control group. The SPD analysis revealed that the experimental group made significantly higher progress in all four quartiles of their coding time. Implications. Our findings suggest that Parsons problems can improve learning efficiency by enhancing novices’ learning experience without negatively impacting their performance or grades, which is especially important when programming is integrated into K12 courses.

Link to Paper from ICER 2024 (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3632620.3671110)

Some announcements below. Please sign up if you would like to volunteer to be a speaker for  future meetings!

• Time: Last Friday of each month from 10:00-11:00 a.m.
• Zoom: The sessions will be held remotely through the provided Zoom link. Upon joining the Google group, you will automatically receive the calendar invites. 
• Student Modeling and Personalization in CS Google Group: To join the group, click this link.
• Agenda: There will be a paper presentation each month. Authors will be invited to present their work, and non-authors can also present a job they have found interesting and valuable to the community. The sessions will conclude with discussions about the work, future research and development directions, and collaboration plans. 
• Scheduling Spreadsheet:  There are three important tabs on the spreadsheet. 1) 2025 Reading Meeting Schedule: you can volunteer for a presentation on this spreadsheet, choosing a date and title that interests you. Here, you can also find prior presentation information, including the recorded sessions. 2) Suggestions for Next Presentations: If a paper interests you but you don't want to present it, you can add it here. We will invite their authors to present their work. You're also welcome to choose a paper that interests in this list to volunteer and present for the next student modeling reading meeting, like I am doing this week! 3) Prior Presentations: Last years' presentation information is here. 
• Moderator:  The moderator will be responsible for organizing presentations each month, including inviting authors (if no one has volunteered already), sharing the advertisements, holding the Zoom sessions, and inserting presentation information on the spreadsheet.

Additionally, please consider forwarding this email to your colleagues if relevant!

Regards,  
Student Modeling Reading Meeting Team

Twitter — https://x.com/csedm

Linkedin -https://www.linkedin.com/groups/9355401/

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