ABSTRACT

Modern educational technology has made it easy to record how learners interact with an application (a hypertext, a problem-solving program, a computer simulation) and with each other. And since log files recorded on individual devices or on specific web applications can continuously be uploaded to web-based servers (e.g., data warehouses, see Koedinger et al., 2010), it becomes even easier to analyze data from many sites. It is not astonishing that the field of educational data mining is burgeoning (Yacef & Baker, 2009). With it comes an increasing awareness that since many of the data that become available from log files contain temporal information, new opportunities arise to study learning from a longitudinal, process-oriented perspective; both individual learning (Azevedo, Moos, Johnson, & Chauncey, 2010) as well as collaborative learning (Rei-mann, 2009).