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Improving TA Feedback on In-Class Coding Assignments for Introductory Computer Science

Published: 07 July 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Teaching assistants (TAs) for introductory computer science courses are most often responsible for providing feedback on student code. TAs, however, lack teaching experience and are rarely trained in how to give effective feedback that positively impacts student learning. The lack of training is particularly problematic when TAs are asked to give feedback in real time, e.g. during in-class coding exercises. We analyzed data from multiple semesters, where CS1 TAs and instructors provided written feedback on in-class coding exercises. Importantly, a very small percentage of feedback met our gold standard for high quality. This finding reveals a need for training TAs to provide more effective feedback in introductory programming courses.

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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Helping to provide adaptive feedback to novice programmers: a framework to assist the Teachers2023 18th Iberian Conference on Information Systems and Technologies (CISTI)10.23919/CISTI58278.2023.10212000(1-6)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2023
  • (2023)A Taxonomy to Assist TAs in Providing Adaptive Feedback to Novice Programmers2023 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)10.1109/FIE58773.2023.10343309(1-9)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2023
  • (2023)Using Assignment Incentives to Reduce Student Procrastination and Encourage Code Review Interactions2023 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI)10.1109/CSCI62032.2023.00270(1628-1633)Online publication date: 13-Dec-2023

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  1. Improving TA Feedback on In-Class Coding Assignments for Introductory Computer Science

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      ITiCSE '22: Proceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education Vol. 1
      July 2022
      686 pages
      ISBN:9781450392013
      DOI:10.1145/3502718
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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      Publication History

      Published: 07 July 2022

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      Author Tags

      1. cs1
      2. feedback
      3. teaching assistant training

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      View all
      • (2023)Helping to provide adaptive feedback to novice programmers: a framework to assist the Teachers2023 18th Iberian Conference on Information Systems and Technologies (CISTI)10.23919/CISTI58278.2023.10212000(1-6)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2023
      • (2023)A Taxonomy to Assist TAs in Providing Adaptive Feedback to Novice Programmers2023 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)10.1109/FIE58773.2023.10343309(1-9)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2023
      • (2023)Using Assignment Incentives to Reduce Student Procrastination and Encourage Code Review Interactions2023 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI)10.1109/CSCI62032.2023.00270(1628-1633)Online publication date: 13-Dec-2023

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