In an offering of CS 1, we monitored the amount of help students in a class received through various means. We found that most students wanted help that went beyond office hours and email, and that for the vast majority of them, their grades correlated positively with the amount of help they received. However, increasing help also requires increasing instructional resources unless techniques can be found to separate the surmountable difficulties from the insurmountable ones. We have developed such a technique that looks at individual interaction logs and classifies difficulties incrementally as they occur. The insight behind the technique is that when students face surmountable difficulties, they tend to repeat certain action sequences, which can be detected to distinguish the surmountable difficulties from the insurmountable ones. A lab study shows that the mechanism gives significantly better results than the baselines.

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