A Systematic Literature Review of Automated Feedback Generation for Programming Exercises
Hieke Keuning, Johan Jeuring, and Bastiaan Heeren
Formative feedback, aimed at helping students to improve their work,
is an important factor in learning. Many tools that offer programming
exercises provide automated feedback on student solutions. We have performed
a systematic literature review to find out what kind of feedback
is provided, which techniques are used to generate the feedback, how adaptable
the feedback is, and how these tools are evaluated. We have designed a labelling
to classify the tools, and use Narciss' feedback content categories to classify
feedback messages. We report on the results of coding a total of 101 tools. We have found
that feedback mostly focuses on identifying
mistakes and less on fixing problems and taking a next step. Furthermore, teachers
cannot easily
adapt tools to their own needs. However, the diversity of feedback types has
increased over the last decades and new techniques are being applied to generate
feedback that is increasingly helpful for students.
In ACM Transactions on Computing Education, 19(1):1-43, 2019.
Links