Analysis of students' learning activities through quantifying time-series comments

Abstract

These days, many university teachers are concerned about the increasing number of students whose motivation is declining. Some of them fall into a situation that they cannot recover from by themselves, and require assistance, but they hesitate to call for help. In order to recognize such students quickly and give guidance to them in class, we have collected time-series comments in the classroom and analyzed them. In the analysis, we divided the comments into the three time slots: P (Previous), C (Current), and N (Next), and quantify them so that we can infer the learning behaviors between the previous and the current classes. We call this analysis method the PCN method. The PCN method is useful for grasping students' learning status in the class. Some of our case studies illustrate the validity of the PCN method. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.