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The “Doer Effect” is the empirical phenomenon observed as a stronger correlational relationship between students who complete more activities and their course learning outcomes compared to those who complete fewer activities or watch fewer videos. In this paper, we extended prior evidence of a “Doer Effect” to investigate how doing more can be related not only to better learning outcomes but also to motivational ones. Specifically, we investigated persistence as the student’s willingness to continue working on course activities. We used secondary analyses of data from MOOC that taught Advanced Placement (AP) Introductory Java Programming to high school students using the digital textbook platform RuneStone. Although we failed to identify a doer effect in learning outcomes, our analyses do suggest that completing more activities is related to longer persistence in the course than reading more pages or watching more videos. This effect does not appear to be limited to highly motivated students. 

Worked code examples are among the most popular types of learning content in programming classes. Most approaches and tools for presenting these examples to students are based on line-by-line explanations of the example code. However, instructors rarely have time to provide line-by-line explanations of a large number of examples typically used in a programming class. This paper explores the opportunity to facilitate the development of worked examples for Java programming through a human-AI collaborative authoring approach. The idea of collaborative authoring is to generate a starting version of code explanations using LLM and present it to the instructor to edit if necessary. The critical step towards implementing this idea is to ensure that LLM can produce code explanations that look meaningful and acceptable to instructors and students. To achieve this goal, we performed an extensive prompt engineering study and evaluated the explanation produced by the selected prompt in a user study with students and authors. 

Worked examples, which present an explained code for solving typical programming problems are among the most popular types of learning content in programming classes. Most approaches and tools for presenting these examples to students are based on line-by-line explanations of the example code. However, instructors rarely have time to provide explanations for many examples typically used in a programming class. In this paper, we assess the feasibility of using LLMs to generate code explanations for passive and active example exploration systems. To achieve this goal, we compare the code explanations generated by chatGPT with the explanations generated by both experts and students. 

Self-explanations could increase student’s comprehension in complex domains; however, it works most efficiently with a human tutor who could provide corrections and scaffolding. In this paper, we present our attempt to scale up the use of self-explanations in learning programming by delegating assessment and scaffolding of explanations to an intelligent tutor. To assess our approach, we performed a randomized control trial experiment that measured the impact of automatic assessment and scaffolding of self-explanations on code comprehension and learning. The study results indicate that low-prior knowledge students in the experimental condition learn more compared to high-prior knowledge in the same condition but such difference is not observed in a similar grouping of students based on prior knowledge in the control condition.