A Framework for the Estimation of Students' Programming Abilities

In times of increasing numbers of students and high usage of e-learning systems, student models are a good way to get an overview of what is currently occurring in the class-room, analyze students' behavior and estimate their learning progress. In our work, we develop a framework which estimates a student's programming knowledge by looking at his responses to open-ended programming assignments. The model we construct incorporates multiple applications of multiple skills in one exercise, multiple submissions and varying knowledge components involved in the same exercise.