This program is tentative and subject to change.

Thu 19 Feb 2026 14:00 - 14:20 at Meeting Room 100 - Assessment and Feedback Chair(s): Sverrir Thorgeirsson

Automated feedback generation plays a crucial role in enhancing personalized learning experiences in computer science education. Among different types of feedback, next-step hint feedback is particularly important, as it provides students with actionable steps to progress towards solving programming tasks. This study investigates how students interact with an AI-driven next-step hint system in an in-IDE learning environment. We gathered and analyzed a dataset from 34 students solving Kotlin tasks, containing over 6 million lines of code and detailed hint interaction logs. We applied process mining techniques and identified 16 common interaction scenarios, along with analyzing transitions between specific actions. Semi-structured interviews with 6 students revealed strategies for managing unhelpful hints, such as adapting partial hints or modifying code to generate multiple variations of the same hint. These findings, combined with our publicly available dataset, offer valuable opportunities for future research and provide key insights into student behavior with hint systems, helping to improve hint design for enhanced learning support.

This program is tentative and subject to change.

Thu 19 Feb

Displayed time zone: Central Time (US & Canada) change

13:40 - 15:00
Assessment and FeedbackPapers at Meeting Room 100
Chair(s): Sverrir Thorgeirsson ETH Zurich
13:40
20m
Talk
Assessing Student Proficiency in Foundational Developer Tools Through Live Checkoffs
Papers
Connor McMahon pc, Lauren Feldman University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
14:00
20m
Talk
Understanding Student Interaction with AI-Powered Next-Step Hints: Strategies and ChallengesGlobal
Papers
Anastasiia Birillo JetBrains Research, Aleksei Rostovskii JetBrains Research, Yaroslav Golubev JetBrains Research, Hieke Keuning Utrecht University
14:20
20m
Talk
Personalized Exam Prep (PEP): Scaling No-Stakes, No-LLM Dialogue-Based Assessments in a Large CS Course
Papers
Kelly Cochran pc, Chris Piech Stanford University
14:40
20m
Talk
Fine-Tuning Open-Source Models as a Viable Alternative to Proprietary LLMs for Explaining Compiler MessagesGlobal
Papers
Lorenzo Lee Solano University of New South Wales, Sydney, Charles Koutcheme Aalto University, Juho Leinonen Aalto University, Alexandra Vassar University of New South Wales, Sydney, Jake Renzella University of New South Wales, Sydney
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