An empirical evaluation of the formative feedback supported by dashboard in the context of compilation error

Abstract

Formative feedback is one of the most recognized types of feedback in academics. However, for feedback to be effective it must be task‐specific, immediate, corrective and positive. At present, automatic feedback is far from these characteristics and leaves the instructor as a fundamental agent in the teaching‐learning process of programming. Faced with this scenario, the lecturer needs support tools that help them to give formative feedback in educational scenarios with many students and little time. In this paper, we have demonstrated that, by using a tool called COLMENA, any lecturer may give students effective formative feedback which is task‐specific, immediate and corrective. COLMENA is a system that combines real‐time Eclipse IDE data retrieval on compilation errors and analytical dashboards in a webapp solution for lecturers and students. In this study, two different approaches have been compared, considering two academic courses with and without COLMENA feedback, respectively. The results indicate that novice students receiving feedback from the lecturer via COLMENA reduced their errors, demonstrating that feedback generated from compilation errors is effective.