Adaptive learning in programming education: A systematic mapping of the literature

This full research paper presents a systematic literature review on adaptive learning in programming education. Learning how to program is a process that requires the ability to solve problems through logical reasoning. In the field of computer science education, various courses are focused on teaching programming. Research has been conducted to evaluate students' learning processes and the reasons for their dropouts in computer science courses. Students have individualized learning speeds and characteristics. The heterogeneity of student characteristics creates a difficulty in adapting the content taught in class, as it is necessary to generalize the approach in the classroom. To achieve this, approaches have used Adaptive Learning (AL) to adapt content according to the student's profile. Resources such as Learning Objects (LO), which can be games, quizzes, interactive experiences, videos, images, etc., are used to achieve this goal. Different authors have conducted studies on Adaptive Learning using algorithms, Human-Computer Interaction techniques, and other forms to analyze students' learning processes. Therefore, it is necessary to identify how Adaptive Learning has been applied to programming education in the existing literature studies. In addition, to characterize the learning styles and metrics used to evaluate these applied methods. Fifty-three articles from the last ten years related to the research objective were selected using the ACM Library, IEEExplore libraries, and Scopus. From these studies, we verified the main LO recommendation methods that use different approaches, such as Item Response Theory, Case-Based Reasoning - CBR, IEEE LOM, genetic algorithms, among others. As well as the learning styles become used, where Felder and Silverman's learning style stands out. In the analyzed studies, the LO that gained more prominence in the research were videos, both media produced by teachers on a local database and video lessons available on video-sharing sites. Finally, an analysis was made of the impact of these methodologies used in AL on the learning process. Thus, with the results obtained from the systematic literature review, it is possible to verify the current state of research regarding Adaptive Learning in programming education and demonstrate how adapting content for different student profiles is necessary.