Feedback on Student Programming Assignments: Teaching Assistants vs Automated Assessment Tool
Nynne Grauslund Kristiansen, Sebastian Mateos Nicolajsen, Claus Brabrand · 2023
Existing research does not quantify and compare the differences between automated and manual assessment in the context of feedback on programming assignments. This makes it hard to reason about the effects of adopting automated assessment at the expense of manual assessment. Based on a controlled experiment involving N=117 undergraduate first-semester CS1 students, we compare the effects of having access to feedback from: i) only automated assessment, ii) only manual assessment (in the form of teaching assistants), and iii) both automated as well as manual assessment. The three conditions are compared in terms of (objective) task effectiveness and from a (subjective) student perspective.