Learnersourcing Personalized Hints

Personalized support for students is a gold standard in education, but it scales poorly with the number of students. Prior work on learnersourcing presented an approach for learners to engage in human computation tasks while trying to learn a new skill. Our key insight is that students, through thei...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Glassman, Elena L, Lin, Aaron S., Cai, Carrie Jun, Miller, Robert C
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Association for Computing Machinery 2017
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/112927
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5178-3496
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9421-7128
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0442-691X
Description
Summary:Personalized support for students is a gold standard in education, but it scales poorly with the number of students. Prior work on learnersourcing presented an approach for learners to engage in human computation tasks while trying to learn a new skill. Our key insight is that students, through their own experience struggling with a particular problem, can become experts on the particular optimizations they implement or bugs they resolve. These students can then generate hints for fellow students based on their new expertise. We present workflows that harvest and organize studentsâ collective knowledge and advice for helping fellow novices through design problems in engineering. Systems embodying each workflow were evaluated in the context of a college-level computer architecture class with an enrollment of more than two hundred students each semester. We show that, given our design choices, students can create helpful hints for their peers that augment or even replace teachersâ personalized assistance, when that assistance is not available.