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Improving student performance by evaluating how well students test their own programs
Abstract
Students need to learn more software testing skills. This paper presents an approach to teaching software testing in a way that will encourage students to practice testing skills in many classes and give them concrete feedback on their testing performance, without requiring a new course, any new faculty resources, or a significant number of lecture hours in each course where testing will be practiced. The strategy is to give students basic exposure to test-driven development, and then provide an automated tool that will assess student submissions on-demand and provide feedback for improvement. This approach has been demonstrated in an undergraduate programming languages course using a prototype tool. The results have been positive, with students expressing appreciation for the practical benefits of test-driven development on programming assignments. Experimental analysis of student programs shows a 28% reduction in defects per thousand lines of code.
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Cited by
A survey of literature on the teaching of introductory programming
Pears, A., Seidman, S., Malmi, L., Mannila, L., Adams, E., Bennedsen, J., Devlin, M., & Paterson, J. (2007) · ACM SIGCSE Bulletin · doi:10.1145/1345375.1345441 · Cited by 481
Learning motivation in e-learning facilitated computer programming courses
Law, K. M. Y., Lee, V. C. S., & Yu, Y. T. (2010) · Computers & Education · doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2010.01.007 · Cited by 379
A systematic literature review of automated feedback generation for programming exercises
Keuning, H., Jeuring, J., & Heeren, B. (2019) · ACM Transactions on Computing Education · doi:10.1145/3231711 · Cited by 370
Web-CAT: automatically grading programming assignments
Edwards, S. H., & Perez-Quinones, M. A. (2008) · Proceedings of the 13th annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education · doi:10.1145/1384271.1384371 · Cited by 256
Self-citationInvestigating the Potential of GPT-3 in Providing Feedback for Programming Assessments
Balse, R., Valaboju, B., Singhal, S., Warriem, J. M., & Prasad, P. (2023) · Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 1 · doi:10.1145/3587102.3588852 · Cited by 63
Metadata
- Authors
- Edwards, S. H.
- Venue
- Journal on Educational Resources in Computing
- Published
- 2003-09
- Volume
- 3
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 1
- ISSN
- 1531-4278 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1967709752
- Cited by
- 179
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 7.77
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
