An Adaptive Testcase Recommendation System to Engage Students in Learning: A Practice Study in Fundamental Programming Courses

Abstract

This paper proposes a testcase recommendation system (TRS) to assist beginner-level learners in introductory programming courses with completing assignments on a learning management system (LMS). These learners often struggle to generate complex testcases and handle numerous code errors, leading to disengaging their attention from the study. The proposed TRS addresses this problem by applying the recommendation system using singular value decomposition (SVD) and the zone of proximal development (ZPD) to provide a small and appropriate set of testcases based on the learner’s ability. We implement this TRS to the university-level Fundamental Programming courses for evaluation. The data analysis has demonstrated that TRS significantly increases student interactions with the system. Keywords—Testcases recommendation system (TRS); learning management system (LMS); zone of proximal development (ZPD); singular value decomposition (SVD)