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).
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.
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
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.