Factors determining the difficulty of practice problems in a computer language textbook
✍ Scribed by Yoshihiro Nakamura; Tsuneo Kuwabara; Kazutoki Takeda
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2000
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 315 KB
- Volume
- 31
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0882-1666
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
We studied the factors which determine the difficulty of practice problems in a computer language textbook. These problems have special features, which are that the amount of knowledge required to solve a problem is large and there is more than one way to find the solution. Moreover, if we give the textbook to learners in order to evaluate the difficulty of the practice problems, we have to take account of the fact that the learner may have trouble understanding and absorbing the explanatory part of the textbook. This, in turn, means that our analysis would need a very complex model. We overcame this by setting certain experimental conditions and so were able to limit our analysis to such factors as the deduction required to solve the problems. Furthermore, we undertook an analysis of factors which can be measured formally. To put this concretely, we studied the relationship between these formal factors and the error rate by means of an experiment using an actual beginner-level C language textbook. The results revealed that the number of inferences provided the best quantitative representation of the difficulty. In addition, we extracted special cognitive loading factors by conducting an error analysis of specific problems which included some deviation from the formal factors. We then made our model more accurate by including these factors among those which were found to be significant. In this way, we estimated the difficulty of the practice problems quantitatively, and showed the effectiveness of our proposed method.