Kenneth Brown
2024
Error Tracing in Programming: A Path to Personalised Feedback
Martha Shaka
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Diego Carraro
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Kenneth Brown
Proceedings of the 19th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2024)
Knowledge tracing, the process of estimating students’ mastery over concepts from their past performance and predicting future outcomes, often relies on binary pass/fail predictions. This hinders the provision of specific feedback by failing to diagnose precise errors. We present an error-tracing model for learning programming that advances traditional knowledge tracing by employing multi-label classification to forecast exact errors students may generate. Through experiments on a real student dataset, we validate our approach and compare it to two baseline knowledge-tracing methods. We demonstrate an improved ability to predict specific errors, for first attempts and for subsequent attempts at individual problems.