Effect of Behavior Patterns of Accessing Learning Materials on Learning Performance in Student-generated Question Activities

This study explores the effects of student behavior patterns on students’ learning performance in a student-generated question experiment. Thirty-three engineering students from a C programming course were recruited as participants. For data collection, student-generated questions, exercises, a final examination, and system logs recorded by an online student-generated questions system were analyzed. The results revealed several significant findings. Firstly, we found that the students accessed the questions generated by the classmate more frequently and for longer than other materials (i.e., exercises and lecture slides). Our results also reveal great diversity among student viewing activities; we therefore partitioned them into three behavior clusters: “Highly-engaged students” who dominate other clusters in the use of all kinds of materials, “Moderately-engaged students” who spent more time on the lecture slides and SGQ, and “Less-engaged students” who seldom used learning materials but accessed exercises more frequently than the “Moderately-engaged students” and also had the highest Test Anxiety. We also observed that motivation and learning performance are strongly associated with behavior patterns. We discuss possible explanations of our findings and propose suggestions for future research.