Nudging Students Toward Better Software Engineering Behaviors
This addresses student struggles in large undergraduate CS courses, but it is incremental as it applies existing behavioral science concepts to a new educational context.
The paper tackled the problem of poor student behaviors like procrastination in programming courses by using a bot system to nudge students toward better software engineering practices, resulting in improved code quality and productivity.
Student experiences in large undergraduate Computer Science courses are increasingly impacted by automated systems. Bots, or agents of software automation, are useful for efficiently grading and generating feedback. Current efforts at automation in CS education focus on supporting instructional tasks, but do not address student struggles due to poor behaviors, such as procrastination. In this paper, we explore using bots to improve the software engineering behaviors of students using developer recommendation choice architectures, a framework incorporating behavioral science concepts in recommendations to improve the actions of programmers. We implemented this framework in class-bot, a novel system designed to nudge students to make better choices while working on programming assignments. This work presents a preliminary evaluation integrating this tool in an introductory programming course. Our results show that class-bot is beneficial for improving student development behaviors increasing code quality and productivity.