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Factors Influencing Students' Help-Seeking Behavior while Programming with Human and Computer Tutors

Published:14 August 2017Publication History

ABSTRACT

When novice students encounter difficulty when learning to program, some can seek help from instructors or teaching assistants. This one-on-one tutoring is highly effective at fostering learning, but busy instructors and large class sizes can make expert help a scarce resource. Increasingly, programming environments attempt to imitate this human support by providing students with hints and feedback. In order to design effective, computer-based help, it is important to understand how and why students seek and avoid help when programming, and how this process differs when the help is provided by a human or a computer. We explore these questions through a qualitative analysis of 15 students' interviews, in which they reflect on solving two programming problems with human and computer help. We discuss implications for help design and present hypotheses on students' help-seeking behavior.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      ICER '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research
      August 2017
      316 pages
      ISBN:9781450349680
      DOI:10.1145/3105726

      Copyright © 2017 ACM

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      • Published: 14 August 2017

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