{"title":"Autonomously Generating Hints by Inferring Problem Solving Policies","authors":"C. Piech, M. Sahami, Jonathan Huang, L. Guibas","doi":"10.1145/2724660.2724668","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Exploring the whole sequence of steps a student takes to produce work, and the patterns that emerge from thousands of such sequences is fertile ground for a richer understanding of learning. In this paper we autonomously generate hints for the Code.org `Hour of Code,' (which is to the best of our knowledge the largest online course to date) using historical student data. We first develop a family of algorithms that can predict the way an expert teacher would encourage a student to make forward progress. Such predictions can form the basis for effective hint generation systems. The algorithms are more accurate than current state-of-the-art methods at recreating expert suggestions, are easy to implement and scale well. We then show that the same framework which motivated the hint generating algorithms suggests a sequence-based statistic that can be measured for each learner. We discover that this statistic is highly predictive of a student's future success.","PeriodicalId":20664,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the Second (2015) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale","volume":"129 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2015-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"139","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Proceedings of the Second (2015) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2724660.2724668","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 139
Abstract
Exploring the whole sequence of steps a student takes to produce work, and the patterns that emerge from thousands of such sequences is fertile ground for a richer understanding of learning. In this paper we autonomously generate hints for the Code.org `Hour of Code,' (which is to the best of our knowledge the largest online course to date) using historical student data. We first develop a family of algorithms that can predict the way an expert teacher would encourage a student to make forward progress. Such predictions can form the basis for effective hint generation systems. The algorithms are more accurate than current state-of-the-art methods at recreating expert suggestions, are easy to implement and scale well. We then show that the same framework which motivated the hint generating algorithms suggests a sequence-based statistic that can be measured for each learner. We discover that this statistic is highly predictive of a student's future success.