Personalized, Adaptive Tutorials for Program Tracing Skills

Abstract

Two large multinational studies show more than 60% of students incorrectly answer questions about the execution of basic programs. Past work has explored writing-focused curricula, but little work explores a reading-first pedagogy, teaching and assessing programming language semantics before teaching learners to write code. The hypothesis of my thesis is An adaptive and motivating reading-first tutorial helps people learn program tracing skills and improves later learning of writing and debugging skills. Towards that goal, I built and evaluated a reading-first tutorial (PLTutor) with a fixed, non-adaptive curriculum, showing 60% higher learning gains (3.9 vs 2.4 on the Second CS1 Assessment (SCS1)) than the writing-focused tutorial Codecademy. I designed and did initial validity studies for a formative assessment for program tracing skills, based on a new formal knowledge model. Next, I will build an adaptive version of PLTutor and evaluate it. In the Koli DC I hope to refine my thesis framing and narrative, get advice on my academic job search, and connect with and potentially help other PhD students and researchers.