A Taxonomy to Assist TAs in Providing Adaptive Feedback to Novice Programmers

The literature indicates that, in general, TAs lack teaching experience, and many of them need appropriate pedagogical training, particularly because they need more knowhow on feedback resources, as well as in providing students with adaptive feedback. Given the mentioned perspective on feedback in introductory programming, one important question is: how can TAs assist in providing adaptive feedback that meets students' needs? To address this issue, guidelines can be provided to clarify what effective feedback is for novice student programmers. However, there is still a lack of guiding elements that constitute adaptive feedback. Thus, to mitigate these problems, we propose a taxonomy for providing adaptive feedback, covering different approaches and feedback resources in problem-solving by novice programmers. The body of knowledge represented in the proposed taxonomy is helpful to be presented to TAs, who should use it to guide their pedagogical decision-making process in relation to adaptive feedback in terms of synthesis and analysis. To our knowledge, a taxonomy for this purpose has yet to be published in the computing education literature. In summary, we intended to investigate the following research questions: (1) What can be adapted in the feedback provided to the beginning programming student during problem-solving? (2) What can be adapted from the feedback provided to the novice programmer during problem-solving? As a method for designing the proposed taxonomy, we followed the Design Science Research (DSR) methodology using its main stages: problem identification, elaboration, testing, and evaluation. As a result, we develop a novel comprehensive taxonomy of adaptive feedback that captures the many elements that one teacher might consider when helping a given student. The taxonomy includes various approaches and features to adaptive feedback, expressed in categories, subcategories, and contextual elements. The main contribution of this paper is to provide a taxonomy that can help TAs use a relevant pedagogical body of knowledge on how to provide adaptive feedback for programming by novices.