Related papers: Estimating Difficulty Levels of Programming Proble…

Many students in introductory programming courses fare poorly in the code writing tasks of the final summative assessment. Such tasks are designed to assess whether novices have developed the analytical skills to translate from the given…

This paper presents a novel approach to automatically solving arithmetic word problems. This is the first algorithmic approach that can handle arithmetic problems with multiple steps and operations, without depending on additional…

In an educational setting, an estimate of the difficulty of multiple-choice questions (MCQs), a commonly used strategy to assess learning progress, constitutes very useful information for both teachers and students. Since human assessment…

The introductory programming sequence has been the focus of much research in computing education. The recent advent of several viable and freely-available AI-driven code generation tools present several immediate opportunities and…

Accurate estimates of item difficulty are essential for valid assessment and effective adaptive learning. However, for newly created tasks, response data are typically unavailable. Pretesting and expert judgement can be costly and slow,…

Adaptive training programs are crucial for recovery post stroke. However, developing programs that automatically adapt depends on quantifying how difficult a task is for a specific individual at a particular stage of their recovery. In this…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong performance on programming tasks, but can they generate student-like code like real students - imperfect, iterative, and stylistically diverse? We present ParaStudent, a systematic study of…

A promising research direction in enabling LLMs to generate consistently correct code involves addressing their inability to properly estimate program execution, particularly for code they generate. In this work, we demonstrate that Code…

Text simplification (TS) systems rewrite text to make it more readable while preserving its content. However, what makes a text easy to read depends on the intended readers. Recent work has shown that pre-trained language models can…

As the complexity of modern software continues to escalate, software engineering has become an increasingly daunting and error-prone endeavor. In recent years, the field of Neural Code Intelligence (NCI) has emerged as a promising solution,…

Teaching logic effectively requires an understanding of the factors which cause logic students to struggle. Formalization exercises, which require the student to produce a formula corresponding to the natural language sentence, are a good…

Bilevel programming problems frequently arise in real-world applications across various fields, including transportation, economics, energy markets and healthcare. These problems have been proven to be NP-hard even in the simplest form with…

Students sometimes produce code that works but that its author does not comprehend. For example, a student may apply a poorly-understood code template, stumble upon a working solution through trial and error, or plagiarize. Similarly,…

Large language models (LLMs) and prompt engineering hold significant potential for advancing computer programming education through personalized instruction. This paper explores this potential by investigating three critical research…

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in math and code reasoning capabilities. However, existing code benchmark are limited in their ability to evaluate the full spectrum of these…

Worked examples are step-by-step solutions to problems in a specific domain, offered to students to acquire domain-specific problem-solving skills. The effectiveness of worked examples could be enhanced by combining them with…

There are countless reasons cited in scientific studies to explain the difficulties in programming learning. The reasons range from the subject's complexity, the ineffective teaching and study methods, to psychological aspects such as…

Deep learning models are widely used for solving challenging code processing tasks, such as code generation or code summarization. Traditionally, a specific model architecture was carefully built to solve a particular code processing task.…

Large language models are increasingly becoming a popular tool for software development. Their ability to model and generate source code has been demonstrated in a variety of contexts, including code completion, summarization, translation,…

Combinatorial optimization problems, such as scheduling and route planning, are crucial in various industries but are computationally intractable due to their NP-hard nature. Neural Combinatorial Optimization methods leverage machine…