Educational process mining: New possibilities for understanding students' problem-solving skills

The assessment of problem-solving skills heavily relies on computer-based assessment (CBA). In CBA, all student interactions with the assessment system are automatically stored. Using the accumulated data, the individual test-taking processes can be reproduced at any time. Going one step further, recorded processes can even be used to extend the problem-solving assessment itself: the test-taking process-related data gives us the opportunity to 1) examine human-computer interactions via traces left in the log file 2) map students’ response processes to find distinguishable problem-solving strategies and 3) discover relationships between students’ activities and task performance. This chapter describes how to extract process-related information from event logs, how to use these data in problem-solving assessments and describes methods which help discover novel, useful information based on individual problem-solving behaviour.