Automated assessment tools: feedback to and from students [Abstract]

Moloughney, Matthew 2026. Automated assessment tools: feedback to and from students [Abstract]. Presented at: SIGCSE TS 2026, St Louis, MO, USA, 18-21 February 2026. Published in: Yuen, T., Joshi, D., Prather, J., Fouh, E. and Kiesler, N. eds. Proceedings of the 57th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. SIGCSE TS 2026. , vol.2 New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 1675-1676. 10.1145/3770761.3777144

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Abstract

We have developed a novel Automated Assessment Tool (AAT) facilitating formative assessments for novice programming students in a Higher Education (HE) CS setting. This AAT forms an analogue of traditional in-person HE CS computer lab sessions. Traditionally teaching staff would engage with students in-person offering feedback to, and receiving feedback from, students about learning materials. Meaningful two-way communication can be difficult to achieve with individuals in larger HE CS cohorts, which may be taught in a blended way. Our novel AAT offers automatically generated feedback to students and captures feedback from students (per question and per assessment) to inform teaching practice. The novel AAT has been used in four semesters with student volunteers from the authors HE CS setting. A mixed-methods approach has captured qualitative and quantitative data. Key findings are: 1. Parsons problem type questions were associated with no negative feedback from students in initial or repeat experiments, unique amongst the four AAT question-types available. 2. Students report concerns about providing free text feedback per question, but we observe this is a valuable source of information for teaching staff - if automatically collated for presentation in conjunction with other types of feedback from students and learning analytics. This research informs on best practices supporting communication between novice programming students and teaching staff where an AAT is a pedagogical necessity, promoting consideration for automatically collated student feedback, as part of AATs. Future work should replicate the experiments conducted in other HE CS settings.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item - published (Other)
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Computer Science & Informatics
Subjects:	L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB2300 Higher Education Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Publisher:	Association for Computing Machinery
ISBN:	9798400722554
Date of Acceptance:	November 2025
Last Modified:	24 Feb 2026 10:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/185099

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