Can log files analysis estimate learners' level of motivation?

Mihaela Cocea, Stephan Weibelzahl

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter (peer-reviewed)peer-review

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Abstract

The learners’ motivation has an impact on the quality of learning, especially in e-Learning environments. Most of these environments store data about the learner’s actions in log files. Logging the users’ interactions in educational systems gives the possibility to track their actions at a refined level of detail. Data mining and machine learning techniques can “give meaning” to these data and provide valuable information for learning improvement. An area where improvement is absolutely necessary and of great importance is motivation, known to be an essential factor for preventing attrition in e-Learning. In this paper we investigate if the log files data analysis can be used to estimate the motivational level of the learner. A decision tree is build from a limited number of log files from a web-based learning environment. The results suggest that time spent reading is an important factor for predicting motivation; also, performance in tests was found to be a relevant indicator of the motivational level.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationLWA 2006: Lernen - Wissensentdeckung - Adaptivitat, 14th Workshop on Adaptivity and User Modeling in Interactive Systems (ABIS 2006)
Place of PublicationHildesheim
PublisherUniversity of Hildesheim, Institute of Computer Science
Pages32-35
Publication statusPublished - 2006
EventLWA -
Duration: 1 May 2011 → …

Publication series

NameHildesheimer Informatik-Berichte
PublisherUniversity of Hildesheim, Institute of Computer Science
Number1/2006
ISSN (Print)0941-3014

Conference

ConferenceLWA
Period1/05/11 → …

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