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1. Tool-Aided Loop Invariant Development: Insights into Student Conceptions and Difficulties

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3430665.3456351  

   Fowler, Megan; Kraemer, Eileen; Sitaraman, Murali; Hollingsworth, Joseph E. (June 2021, ITiCSE '21: Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education)

   null (Ed.)

   To develop code that meets its specification and is verifiably correct, such as in a software engineering course, students must be able to understand formal contracts and annotate their code with assertions such as loop invariants. To assist in developing suitable instructor and automated tool interventions, this research aims to go beyond simple pre- and post-conditions and gain insight into student learning of loop invariants involving objects. As students develop suitable loop invariants for given code with the aid of an online system backed by a verification engine, each student attempt, either correct or incorrect, was collected and analyzed automatically, and catalogued using an iterative process to capture common difficulties. Students were also asked to explain their thought process in arriving at their answer for each submission. The collected explanations were analyzed manually and found to be useful to assess their level of understanding as well as to extract actionable information for instructors and automated tutoring systems. Qualitative conclusions include the impact of the medium. 

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2. Insights from Student Solutions to SQL Homework Problems

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3341525.3387391  

   Poulsen, Seth; Butler, Liia; Alawini, Abdussalam; Herman, Geoffrey L. (June 2020, Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education)

   null (Ed.)

   We analyze the submissions of 286 students as they solved Structured Query Language (SQL) homework assignments for an upper-level databases course. Databases and the ability to query them are becoming increasingly essential for not only computer scientists but also business professionals, scientists, and anyone who needs to make data-driven decisions. Despite the increasing importance of SQL and databases, little research has documented student difficulties in learning SQL. We replicate and extend prior studies of students' difficulties with learning SQL. Students worked on and submitted their homework through an online learning management system with support for autograding of code. Students received immediate feedback on the correctness of their solutions and had approximately a week to finish writing eight to ten queries. We categorized student submissions by the type of error, or lack thereof, that students made, and whether the student was eventually able to construct a correct query. Like prior work, we find that the majority of student mistakes are syntax errors. In contrast with the conclusions of prior work, we find that some students are never able to resolve these syntax errors to create valid queries. Additionally, we find that students struggle the most when they need to write SQL queries related to GROUP BY and correlated subqueries. We suggest implications for instruction and future research. 

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3. Avoiding help avoidance: Using interface design changes to promote unsolicited hint usage in an intelligent tutor.

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s40593-020-00213-3  

   Maniktala, M.; Cody, C.; Barnes, T.; & Chi, M. (January 2020, Journal of artificial intelligence in education)

   null (Ed.)

   Within intelligent tutoring systems, considerable research has in-vestigated hints, including how to generate data-driven hints, what hint con-tent to present, and when to provide hints for optimal learning outcomes. How-ever, less attention has been paid to how hints are presented. In this paper, we propose a new hint delivery mechanism called “Assertions” for providing unsolicited hints in a data-driven intelligent tutor. Assertions are partially-worked example steps designed to appear within a student workspace, and in the same format as student-derived steps, to show students a possible subgoal leading to the solution. We hypothesized that Assertions can help address the well-known hint avoidance problem. In systems that only provide hints upon request, hint avoidance results in students not receiving hints when they are needed. Our unsolicited Assertions do not seek to improve student help-seeking, but rather seek to ensure students receive the help they need. We contrast Assertions with Messages, text-based, unsolicited hints that appear after student inactivity. Our results show that Assertions significantly increase unsolicited hint usage compared to Messages. Further, they show a signifi-cant aptitude-treatment interaction between Assertions and prior proficiency, with Assertions leading students with low prior proficiency to generate shorter (more efficient) posttest solutions faster. We also present a clustering analysis that shows patterns of productive persistence among students with low prior knowledge when the tutor provides unsolicited help in the form of Assertions. Overall, this work provides encouraging evidence that hint presentation can significantly impact how students use them and using Assertions can be an effective way to address help avoidance. 

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4. Pin Status: An Arduino Debugging Library for High School E-textile Courses

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3328778.3372712  

   Schneider, Michael (February 2020, SIGCSE '20: Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education)

   When learning to code a student must learn both to create a program and then how to debug said program. Novices often start with print statements to help trace code execution and isolate logical errors. Eventually, they adopt advance debugger practices such as breakpoints, "stepping" through code execution, and "watching" variables as their values are updated. Unfortunately for students working with Arduino devices, there are no debugger tools built into the Arduino IDE. Instead, a student would have to move onto a professional IDE like Atmel Studio and/or acquire a hardware debugger. Except, these options have a steep learning curve and are not intended for a student who has just started to learn how to write code. I am developing an Arduino software library, called Pin Status, to assist novice programmers with debugging common logic errors and provide features specific to the e-textile microcontroller, Adafruit Circuit Playground Classic. 

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5. Integrating Personalized Parsons Problems with Multi-Level Textual Explanations to Scaffold Code Writing

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3626253.3635606  

   Hou, Xinying; Ericson, Barbara J; Wang, Xu (March 2024, Proceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE))

   Novice programmers need to write basic code as part of the learning process, but they often face difficulties. To assist struggling students, we recently implemented personalized Parsons problems, which are code puzzles where students arrange blocks of code to solve them, as pop-up scaffolding. Students found them to be more engaging and preferred them for learning, instead of simply receiving the correct answer, such as the response they might get from generative AI tools like ChatGPT. However, a drawback of using Parsons problems as scaffolding is that students may be able to put the code blocks in the correct order without fully understanding the rationale of the correct solution. As a result, the learning benefits of scaffolding are compromised. Can we improve the understanding of personalized Parsons scaffolding by providing textual code explanations? In this poster, we propose a design that incorporates multiple levels of textual explanations for the Parsons problems. This design will be used for future technical evaluations and classroom experiments. These experiments will explore the effectiveness of adding textual explanations to Parsons problems to improve instructional benefits. 

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