By Serrano, V. Cuadros, J., Martori, F., Calvo, M., Miñarro, T., & Gorina, V. (IQS Universitat Ramon Llull)
Abstract
"R Commander is the most well-known GUI for teaching and learning statistics as it is used all over the world in many Statistics courses. R Commander allows the use of R without compromising the learning process as the command line interface to R can be an obstacle to many students (Fox, 2005). We have tweaked R Commander so that an activity log of the students’ work is obtained (Miñarro et al, 2015). A Shiny app has been designed to provide a user-friendly interface to quickly visually the work done by students and identify those who may require special attention from the instructor (Martori et al, 2017). We present here the visualizations we have included in this tool to detail which informations teachers can take from it.
First, the instructor can look at the amount of work done by each of the student both in terms of time and in terms of number of actions. Thus, the students requiring specific attention can easily be spotted. Second, the teacher can look at some details of the resolution path taken by the students. The most common commands are presented and relevant events (milestones) in the problem solving process can easily be identified. Last, from the resolution process a grade is calculated and tools are provided to discuss this mark with the students and analyze what any specific student did to solve the problem. The use of this tool should allow Statistics instructors to provide better and personalized feedback to students about their learning process.
REFERENCES Fox, J. (2005). The R Commander: a basic statistics graphical user interface to R. Journal of Statistical Software. September 2005, Volume 14, Issue 9. Martori, F., Cuadros, J., Calvo, M., Miñarro, A., Serrano, V., & Gorina, V. (2017, July). How students learn Statistics: from tracing student’s activity in R Commander to the visualization of their work through a Shiny app. In The R User Conference, useR! 2017 July 4-7 2017 Brussels, Belgium (p. 249). Miñarro, A., Carnicer, J., Cuadros, J., Martori, F., & Calvo, M. (2015). Generación de trazas en R-commander para el seguimiento del trabajo del alumno. XXXV Congreso Nacional de Estadística e Investigación Operativa. Pamplona."