Feedback em ambientes educacionais no domínio de programação.

Abstract

The use of online learning environments - whose goal is to aid in the teaching-learning process - has shown rapid growth in recent years. One of the critical components of these environments is feedback. The feedback is considered one of the most significant factors in the learning process, and it is essential for the student to obtain a return on his/her performance and learning. Providing feedback to students in online learning environments is challenging since there is some factors and settings should be taken into account for specifying feedback, such as the content of questions, presentation form, and the level of customization. In this context, this work discusses the challenges of creating feedback for educational environments in the programming domain, where students need to practice programming through the submission of algorithms that solve problems. Most of the learning systems provide poor quality feedback, only informing the student if his/her solution is correct or not. Many students can not, from this simple feedback, progress in their learning. In this perspective, this work proposes a feedback mechanism, to be used in educational programming environments, which assists the student in the process of elaborating his solution, providing tips on the next steps and correction of errors. For the mechanism to be created, a conceptual model was developed to specify the feedback that would be used. The validation of the work was carried out through the application of a quasi-experiment with a group of students of an introductory programming course. The results showed that the practice of programming exercises with the help of the feedback mechanism created had a positive impact on student learning. ii