Improving feedback in elementary mathematics autograders

As schools grow more crowded and required testing outcomes become more stringent, teachers experience increasing demands on their time. To ease this load, I designed a program that is able to give students thorough, automated feedback on their mathematics assignments. This will allow teachers to spend less time grading (and consequently more time on other activities that might better help their students) without losing any of the feedback and error correcting a human would be able to provide. Based on a number of different test cases, using a wide variety of elementary algebra problems, the program can correctly identify the lines in which errors are introduced. The program is also adept at finding the precise error as long as the student has made minimal changes per step. If multiple changes have been made, the program is forced to make its best guess at the most likely error without resorting to testing hundreds of possible combinations.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• Greene, Stephanie Denise Carter

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Patrick H. Winston.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/100676

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/100676