Supporting student success in computing courses through personalized peer advice

Abstract

Rapid growth of enrollment has rendered students' academic success in computing courses increasingly important. Given the value of having insight from a peer's point of view, advice from students who have taken such courses will greatly help their peers better prepare for, and be academically successful in, those courses. We present a novel personalized peer advice recommender system called myCCAdvice (my-Computing-Course-Advice), which provides individual students with personalized peer advice on new computing courses. myCCAdvice finds students similar to a given student via multi-criteria rating-based collaborative filtering, using grades and perceived difficulty of the courses' concept and coding components as course ratings. For a given course, myCCAdvice then predicts the given student's personalized grade and perceived difficulty of concept and coding, and suggests personalized textual peer advice for the given student to succeed. paper, we propose a novel personalized peer advice recommendation system called myCCAdvice to help individual students better prepare for new computing courses.