Meaningful automated feedback on Objected-Oriented program development tasks in Java

Automation has been used to assess student programming tasks for over 60 years. As well as assessing work, it can also be used in the provision of feedback, commonly though the utilisation of unit tests or evaluation of program output. This typically requires a structure to be provided, for example provision of a method stub or programming to an interface. This scaffolded approach is required in statically typed, object-oriented languages such as Java, as if tests rely on non-existent code, compilation will fail. Previous studies identified that for many tools, feedback is limited to a comparison of the student's solution with a reference, the results of unit tests, or how actual output compares with that which is expected. This paper discusses a tool that provides automated textual feedback on programming tasks. This tool, the “Java Object-Oriented Feedback Tool” (JOOFT), allows the instructor to write unit tests for as yet unwritten code, with their own feedback, almost as easily as writing a standard unit test. JOOFT also provides additional, customisable, feedback for student errors that might occur in the process of writing code, such as specifying an incorrect parameter type for a method. A randomised trial of the tool was carried out with novice student programmers (n=109), who completed a lab task on the design of a class, 52 of them having assistance from the tool. Whilst students provided positive feedback on tool usage, performance in a later assessment of class creation, suggests student outcomes are not affected.