Abstract
Do students retain the programming concepts they have learned using software tutors over the long term? In order to answer this question, we analyzed the data collected by a software tutor on selection statements. We used the data of the students who used the tutor more than once to see whether they had retained for the second session what they had learned during the first session. We found that students retained over 71% of selection concepts that they had learned during the first session. The more problems students solved during the first session, the greater the percentage of retention. Even when students already knew a concept and did not benefit from using the tutor, a small percentage of concepts were forgotten from the first session to the next, corresponding to transience of learning. Transience of learning varied with concepts. We list confounding factors of the study.
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Partial support for this work was provided by the National Science Foundation under grant DUE-1432190.
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Kumar, A.N. (2020). Long Term Retention of Programming Concepts Learned Using a Software Tutor. In: Kumar, V., Troussas, C. (eds) Intelligent Tutoring Systems. ITS 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12149. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49663-0_46
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49663-0_46
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