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Many instructors choose to assess their students using open-ended written exam items that require students to show their understanding of physics by solving a problem and/or explaining a concept. Grading these items is fairly time…
Identifying and resolving logic errors can be one of the most frustrating challenges for novices programmers. Unlike syntax errors, for which a compiler or interpreter can issue a message, logic errors can be subtle. In certain conditions,…
Imagine you are a teacher attempting to assess a student's level in a particular subject. If you design a test with only hard questions, and the student fails, this mostly proves that the student does not understand the more advanced…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a popular choice for many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks due to their versatility and ability to produce high-quality results. Specifically, they are increasingly used for automatic code…
Background and Context: Some skills taught in introductory programming courses are categorized into 1) explaining code, 2) arranging lines of code in correct sequence, 3) tracing through the execution of a program, and 4) writing code from…
Transitioning from block-based programming to text-based programming environments can be challenging as it requires students to learn new programming language concepts. In this paper, we identify and classify the issues encountered when…
Markov decision problems (MDPs) provide the foundations for a number of problems of interest to AI researchers studying automated planning and reinforcement learning. In this paper, we summarize results regarding the complexity of solving…
Discovering significant itemsets is one of the fundamental problems in data mining. It has recently been shown that constraint programming is a flexible way to tackle data mining tasks. With a constraint programming approach, we can easily…
Programming is increasingly taught using block-based languages like Scratch. While the use of blocks prevents syntax errors, learners can still make semantic mistakes, requiring feedback and help. As teachers may be overwhelmed by help…
We consider the problem of dictionary learning under the assumption that the observed signals can be represented as sparse linear combinations of the columns of a single large dictionary matrix. In particular, we analyze the minimax risk of…
Electronic exams (e-exams) have the potential to substantially reduce the effort required for conducting an exam through automation. Yet, care must be taken to sacrifice neither task complexity nor constructive alignment nor grading…
This paper describes how to adapt a static code analyzer to help novice programmers. Current analyzers have been built to give feedback to experienced programmers who build new applications or systems. The type of feedback and the type of…
Ranking problems, also known as preference learning problems, define a widely spread class of statistical learning problems with many applications, including fraud detection, document ranking, medicine, credit risk screening, image ranking…
Software developers often submit questions to technical Q&A sites like Stack Overflow (SO) to resolve code-level problems. In practice, they include example code snippets with questions to explain the programming issues. Existing research…
We introduce a new type of programming challenge called programming puzzles, as an objective and comprehensive evaluation of program synthesis, and release an open-source dataset of Python Programming Puzzles (P3). Each puzzle is defined by…
Students must learn effective problem solving strategies in order to develop expertise in physics. Effective problem solving strategies include a conceptual analysis of the problem followed by planning of the solution, and then…
Helping students learn to think like a physicist is an important goal of many introductory physics courses. One characteristic distinguishing more experienced physicists from novice students is that they make better use of problem solving…
Debugging is often a challenging and infuriating experience for secondary school students learning their first text-based programming language. Many students resort to ineffective debugging strategies, making success with solving errors…
In this study, we examine introductory physics students' ability to perform analogical reasoning between two isomorphic problems which employ the same underlying physics principles but have different surface features. Three hundred and…
Well-developed problem-solving skills are essential for any student enrolled in a science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) course as well as for graduates in the workforce. One of the most essential skills is the ability to…