Improving Code Comprehension Through Scaffolded Self-explanations
Abstract
Self-explanations could increase student’s comprehension in complex domains; however, it works most efficiently with a human tutor who could provide corrections and scaffolding. In this paper, we present our attempt to scale up the use of self-explanations in learning programming by delegating assessment and scaffolding of explanations to an intelligent tutor. To assess our approach, we performed a randomized control trial experiment that measured the impact of automatic assessment and scaffolding of self-explanations on code comprehension and learning. The study results indicate that low-prior knowledge students in the experimental condition learn more compared to high-prior knowledge in the same condition but such difference is not observed in a similar grouping of students based on prior knowledge in the control condition.
Publication Title
Communications in Computer and Information Science
Recommended Citation
Oli, P., Banjade, R., Lekshmi Narayanan, A., Chapagain, J., Tamang, L., Brusilovsky, P., & Rus, V. (2023). Improving Code Comprehension Through Scaffolded Self-explanations. Communications in Computer and Information Science, 1831 CCIS, 478-483. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36336-8_74
