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• Whether the peers selected by the peer recommendation system were willing and able to answer the assigned
questions.
Results
Experimental results about the WCSS
After submitting an assigned programming exercise, the students were required to answer a question, “How do you
complete the exercise?” Figure 7 presents the percentages of each answer in each assignment. The sum of the
percentages of answers 2 and 3 in each assigngmnet from assignments 1–3 (without WCSS) were obviously lower
than the sum of the percentages of answers 2 and 3 from assignments 5–7 (with WCSS). This result may reveal that
students with the support of the WCSS have higher likelihood of doing their coursework within their ZPD than
without the support of WCSS.
Figure 7. Percentage of each answer of the question “How do you complete the programming exercise”
In order to investigate whether the result was statistically significant, a paired t-test was conducted. Because in the
assignment 4, the students were able to use the e-dictionary and the peer recommendation system, but the three
exercises were not selected by PADS. Therefore, the paired t-test compares the average number of answers 2 and 3
in an assignment during assignment 1-3 (without WCSS) with the average number of answers 2 and 3 in an
assignment during assignment 5-7 (with WCSS). As shown in Table 4, the result was significant (t=-11.366,
p=0.00