Towards the Use of Slice-based Cohesion Metrics with Learning Analytics to Assess Programming Skills

In programming education, it makes a difference whether you are dealing with beginners or advanced students. As our future students will become even more tech-savvy, it is necessary to assess programming skills appropriately and quickly to protect them from boredom and optimally support the learning process. In this work, we advocate for the use of slice-based cohesion metrics to assess the process of program construction in a learning analytics setting. We argue that semantically related parts during program construction are an essential part of programming skills. Therefore, we propose using cohesion metrics on the level of variables to identify programmers’ trains of thought based on the cohesion of semantically related parts during program construction.