This dissertation focuses on strategies and techniques to enhance code comprehension skills among students enrolled in introductory computer science courses (CS1 and CS2). We propose a novel tutoring system, "DeepCodeTutor," designed to improve the code comprehension abilities of novices. DeepCodeTutor employs scaffolded self-explanation…

Background: Skill integration is vital in students' mastery development and is especially prominent in developing code tracing skills which are foundational to programming, an increasingly important area in the current STEM education. However, instructional design to support skill integration in learning technologies has been limited. Objectives:…

This study explores the potential of the large language model GPT-4 as an automated tool for qualitative data analysis by educational researchers, exploring which techniques are most successful for different types of constructs. Specifically, we assess three different prompt engineering strategies -- Zero-shot, Few-shot, and Fewshot with…

When students are first learning to program, they not only have to learn to write programs, but also how to trace them. Code tracing involves stepping through a program step-by-step, which helps to predict the output of the program and identify bugs. Students routinely struggle with this activity, as evidenced by prior work and our own experiences…

To provide personalized help to students who are working on code-writing problems, we introduce a data-driven tutoring system, ITAP (Intelligent Teaching Assistant for Programming). ITAP uses state abstraction, path construction, and state reification to automatically generate personalized hints for students, even when given states that have not…

Computer science instructors typically have many responsibilities, such as creating material, delivering lectures, clarifying student questions, and grading student deliverables, while the demand for computer science education has been increasing. Handling all of these responsibilities is challenging in itself. However, it is made worse when…

Software engineers are tasked with writing functionally correct code of high quality. Maintainability is a crucial code quality attribute that determines the ease of analyzing, modifying, reusing, and testing a software component. This quality attribute significantly affects the software's lifetime cost, contributing to developer productivity and…

Programming skills are a vital part of many disciplines but can be challenging to teach and learn. Thus, the programming courses are considered difficult and a major stumbling block. To overcome these challenges, students could benefit from extensive individual support such as tutoring, but there are simply not enough qualified tutors available to…

Contribution: A new operational definition of series connections is given based on elements belonging to the same two meshes, which is properly dual to the usual definition of parallel elements being connected to the same two nodes. Furthermore, computer-based exercises have been developed and tested to teach students about such connections in…

Metacognition and self-regulation are important skills for successful learning and have been discussed and researched extensively in the general education literature for several decades. More recently, there has been growing interest in understanding how metacognitive and self-regulatory skills contribute to student success in the context of…

Background and Context: Recursion in binary trees has proven to be a hard topic. There was not much research on enhancing student understanding of this topic. Objective: We present a tutorial to enhance learning through practice of recursive operations in binary trees, as it is typically taught post-CS2. Method: We identified the misconceptions…

Formative feedback, aimed at helping students to improve their work, is an important factor in learning. Many tools that offer programming exercises provide automated feedback on student solutions. We have performed a systematic literature review to find out what kind of feedback is provided, which techniques are used to generate the feedback, how…

The first intelligent tutoring systems for computer programming have been proposed more than 30 years ago, mostly focusing on well defined programming tasks e.g. in the context of logic programming. Recent systems also teach complex programs, where explicit modelling of every possible program and mistake is no longer possible. Such systems are…

Background: Typical scaffolding coding schemes provide overall scores to compare across a sample. As such, insights into the scaffolding process can be obscured: the child's contribution to the learning; the particular skills being taught and learned; and the overall changes in amount of scaffolding over the course of the task. Aims: This study…

This article describes several approaches to assessing student understanding using written explanations that students generate as part of a multiple-document inquiry activity on a scientific topic (global warming). The current work attempts to capture the causal structure of student explanations as a way to detect the quality of the students'…