Ignore These Errors for Now' - How Experts Provide Feedback on Steps Novices Take Towards Solving Programming Problems

Abstract

Formative feedback can be crucial for developing programming competencies, especially among novice learners. Despite the importance of appropriate timing and feedback content, there is often no consensus among experts when and how to give feedback on steps learners take when solving programming tasks. This disagreement is due to the subjective nature of expert assessments, which often rely on personal experience and intuition. To better understand how experts give feedback, we surveyed a diverse group of programming educators on how to give feedback on steps of a novice's programming process. We qualitatively analyzed the open-ended answers and developed a classification representing the categories of human feedback in the context of programming education. The results show that the existing programming feedback taxonomies cannot be applied 1:1 to expert feedback as they were designed for automated systems and cannot adequately cover the nuances of human expert interventions. Thereby, this work has implications for educators aiming to improve instruction and feedback strategies, but also researchers studying (human) feedback and its effects.