Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

2-2021

Abstract

With the rapid development of online education in recent years, there has been an increasing number of learning platforms that provide students with multi-step questions to cultivate their problem-solving skills. To guarantee the high quality of such learning materials, question designers need to inspect how students’ problem-solving processes unfold step by step to infer whether students’ problem-solving logic matches their design intent. They also need to compare the behaviors of different groups (e.g., students from different grades) to distribute questions to students with the right level of knowledge. The availability of fine-grained interaction data, such as mouse movement trajectories from the online platforms, provides the opportunity to analyze problem-solving behaviors. However, it is still challenging to interpret, summarize, and compare the high dimensional problem-solving sequence data. In this paper, we present a visual analytics system, QLens, to help question designers inspect detailed problem-solving trajectories, compare different student groups, distill insights for design improvements. In particular, QLens models problem-solving behavior as a hybrid state transition graph and visualizes it through a novel glyph-embedded Sankey diagram, which reflects students’ problem-solving logic, engagement, and encountered difficulties. We conduct three case studies and three expert interviews to demonstrate the usefulness of QLens on real-world datasets that consist of thousands of problem-solving traces.

Keywords

Problem Solving, Hidden Markov Models, Visual Analytics, Data Visualization, Task Analysis, Programming, Learning Behavior Analysis, Visual Analytics, Time Series Data

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Programming Languages and Compilers | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

Volume

27

Issue

2

First Page

870

Last Page

880

ISSN

1077-2626

Identifier

10.1109/TVCG.2020.3030337

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2020.3030337

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