About Me

I am Fariha, a PhD student in Computer Science at Virginia Tech. I am supervised by Dr. David H. Smith IV in the ASCEND Lab. I completed my Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh.

My research centers on how we can measure what a programming student actually knows as they learn. I work with learning analytics, knowledge tracing, and learning-curve modeling, with a particular interest in where these models break down — where a single "skill" turns out to be several distinct sub-skills the model cannot separate. I am also drawn to the learning science underneath these methods: how students acquire skills, how they retain them, and what our models should be measuring in the first place.