Automated feedback on programs means students need less help from teachers
Elizabeth Odekirk-Hash, Joseph L. Zachary · 2001
Many educators believe that the most effective means of teaching is through one-on-one interactions with students. It is not surprising, then, that an effective way to teach programming is to give students immediate feedback on programs that they have just written. Unfortunately, such one-on-one teaching scenarios are becoming increasingly difficult to arrange. We built InSTEP, an online tutoring system for beginning C programmers, to see whether an automated system could provide effective immediate feedback to beginning programming students. In an introductory programming course, we compared two groups of students. One group solved six programming problems with feedback from InSTEP; the second group solved the same six problems without feedback from InSTEP; both groups had access to feedback from teaching assistants. While both groups of students took about the same amount of time to complete the problems and performed about the same on a subsequent test, the students who received feedback from InSTEP spent less than a third of the time asking the teaching assistants questions than did the others.