Responses to adaptive feedback for software testing

Abstract

As students learn to program they also learn basic software development methods and techniques, but educators do not often directly assess students' development processes or evaluate their adherence to specific techniques. However, automated grading systems provide opportunities to evaluate students' programming and provide feedback while the student is still in the process of developing. Consequently, automated adaptive feedback may help reinforce effective techniques and processes. This paper describes an adaptive feedback system that uses strategic reinforcement techniques to reward and encourage incremental software testing. By analyzing changes in students' code after they receive the system's reinforcement, we investigated students' responses to the presence and absence of rewards. We found that after receiving rewards, students respond with more test code in their subsequent submission.