A Knowledge-Component-Based Methodology for Evaluating AI Assistants

TL;DR

This paper presents a methodology using knowledge components to evaluate the effectiveness of GPT-4 generated hints in helping CS1 students improve their programming solutions, demonstrating that targeted hints accelerate learning.

Contribution

It introduces a knowledge-component-based framework for evaluating AI-generated hints, linking hints to specific student errors and showing their impact on learning progress.

Findings

Hints help students fix code more quickly

Hints accurately identify key errors in student solutions

Multi-issue hints lead to better student progress

Abstract

We evaluate an automatic hint generator for CS1 programming assignments powered by GPT-4, a large language model. This system provides natural language guidance about how students can improve their incorrect solutions to short programming exercises. A hint can be requested each time a student fails a test case. Our evaluation addresses three Research Questions: RQ1: Do the hints help students improve their code? RQ2: How effectively do the hints capture problems in student code? RQ3: Are the issues that students resolve the same as the issues addressed in the hints? To address these research questions quantitatively, we identified a set of fine-grained knowledge components and determined which ones apply to each exercise, incorrect solution, and generated hint. Comparing data from two large CS1 offerings, we found that access to the hints helps students to address problems with their code more quickly, that hints are able to consistently capture the most pressing errors in students' code, and that hints that address a few issues at once rather than a single bug are more likely to lead to direct student progress.