Can students help themselves? An investigation of students’ feedback on the quality of the source code

Abstract

This Research to Practice Full Paper presents a study on the evaluation of qualitative aspects of students’ programs in an introductory programming course. Approaches have been proposed in order to address the quality of the source code, but they typically focus on automated analysis of syntactic aspects which might lead to generic feedback. In this study, we investigate if, by including students as evaluators, we could provide personalized feedback on the quality of source code. To do so, we applied a survey with assignments and their respective source codes answered by students in previous terms. Teachers and students analyze those source codes and gave suggestions to improve them qualitatively and, we found that most students identified code quality aspects with a similarity equal to or greater than 50% in comparison to teachers’ and that similarity increases as students progress in the course. We found that students are particularly good at finding and giving feedback on complexity issues. This study may lead to further investigations on addressing source code quality on collaborative learning, and may also support the development of lint-like tools, once it yields detailed information on how students provide feedback regarding source code quality.