2014 Proceedings of the Information Systems Educators Conference ISSN: 2167-1435 Baltimore, Maryland USA v31 n3086 _________________________________________________ _________________________________________________ ©2014 EDSIG (Education Special Interest Group of the AITP), www.aitp-edsig.org Page 1 and FITE (Foundation for Information Technology Education), edfoundation.org/ Examining Student Learning in Spreadsheet Assignments: The value of activity-trace logs Gove Allen gove@byu.edu Information System Department Brigham Young University Provo, UT 84602, USA Nicholas Ball nicholas.ball@uvu.edu Information Technology Department Utah Valley University Orem, UT 84058, USA John Chapman chapmanjs@byu.edu Randy Davies randy.davies@byu.edu Instructional Psychology and Technology Department, Brigham Young University Provo, UT 84602, USA Abstract In most problem-solving assignments, professors evaluate student solutions without the ability to observe the process students used to arrive at their solutions. This paper presents an approach for allowing professors to have detailed, activity-trace process data about how students arrived at solutions, giving insights into reasoning and student misunderstandings that happen (and are sometimes corrected) prior to submission. By rendering the assignment in Excel and using a template configured to log cell changes, the files submitted by students contain transactional level data for each attempt made. These activity-trace logs also provide a powerful mechanism to tell when students are copying work from other students. An example of how this can help instructors understand the scope of student misconception is presented. Keywords: Excel, Educational Data Mining, Learning Analytics, data logging, analyzing student learning.