Search tools for scaling expert code review to the global classroom

This thesis aims to answer the question "How can teachers of online classrooms give more qualitative feedback to students?" We narrow the scope of this question to an online software engineering class in which a major component is code review. We built two search tools that give teachers better coverage of student code. The first tool, Comment Search, allows students and staff to reuse any comment they previously wrote when reviewing another student's code. Staff can reuse any comment written by any staff member as well. After deploying Comment Search in a classroom for a full semester, we found that students and staff used this tool to write higher quality comments. We also found that many reused comments were about similar patterns in code. This inspired the second tool, Code Search, which allows teachers to search for sections of student code that contain a desired pattern. Preliminary results of Code Search are promising: for the queries that Code Search is built for, Code Search returns nearly all relevant results. Together, Comment Search and Code Search offer teachers the ability to give meaningful comments to many more students than otherwise possible.

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

• Klein, Abigail (Abigail B.)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Robert C. Miller.

• 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/1721.1/105991

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/105991