Authors
Tanja Reinhardt & Nelishia Pillay
Abstract
Spreadsheets have become a routine application in most organizations and Universities. As a consequence, students are required to learn spreadsheet applications such as Microsoft Excel.
The learning of spreadsheets is often accompanied by problems related to spreadsheet application and their mathematical content. The EXITS (Excel Intelligent Tutoring System) research project aims to develop a Microsoft Excel tutor that help students or learners to overcome their learning difficulties.
In this paper, we analyse and classify spreadsheet errors made by students in order to determine the function that our system should perform and to generate an error library for student modelling purposes.
Sample
We looked at the different types of errors students made and classified three error categories that will help us to reduce the complexity of an error library:
- General errors (GE) that are valid for any function and formula, e.g. students were not able to write down a solution at all.
- General errors (GE) that occur in formulae and functions with a similar syntax, e.g. errors in the argument of functions like the SUM or AVERAGE function, which use the same syntax to perform a calculation.
- Specific errors (SE) that only occur in particular formulae and functions, e.g. students used an incorrect condition in an IF-function.
This figure gives an overview of the general errors.
Publication
2004, International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, August/September, pages 852-853
Full article
Analysis of spreadsheet errors made by computer literacy students
