I think data mining editor/IDE use is a pretty useful idea overall and the "paradigm shift" of constant monitoring which allows immediate teacher feedback is mu

I think data mining editor/IDE use is a pretty useful idea overall and the "paradigm shift" of constant monitoring which allows immediate teacher feedback is much needed (not just for programming). The other interesting approach I read about a while back was using tracing quiz data to identify "blind spots". A typical example was identifying students that had problems understanding loop constructs (they would always assume one iteration for example). I talked to one of the authors of this paper and he had some interesting ideas fro CS education in general: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2526978 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2526978 My gut instinct and thinking back to my university days make me think that a blind spot for recursion may very well be a thing. I'd be pretty interested in identifying students that struggle with loops and/or recursion and investigating that further. For example...is there a correlation? If not what happens if you give a loop-struggler group only recursive tasks and a recursion-struggler group only loop tasks? Etc.