TutorTrace: A Dataset and Taxonomy for Classifying Learner Behavioral States during AI-Assisted Programming Education

Abstract

AI programming tutors provide scalable support, yet lack the behavioral context human tutors rely on to adapt support to learners' needs. We present TutorTrace, a dataset and behavioral abstraction pipeline that makes learners' behavioral context visible and computable in real time from low-level IDE telemetry. Across four deployments in two introductory Python courses (N=480), TutorTrace captures approximately 180K telemetry events, 13,633 behavioral segments, and 27 continuously computed metrics. From this foundation, we derive a taxonomy of learner activity before the first AI query, between consecutive queries, and across the full session, enabling systems to respond not just to what learners say, but to what they have done leading up to the help-seeking moment. In a preliminary classroom evaluation, behavior-aware prompts were associated with a decrease in intervals between queries with no independent work from 50.0% to 20.7%. As an additional demonstration of downstream utility, we evaluate TutorTrace on two held-out prediction tasks: whether a learner will query within the next 60 seconds (AUROC=.726) and whether an upcoming query reflects guided or dependent help-seeking (AUROC=.717). Together, these findings show how behavioral context can enable adaptive AI tutoring at scale.