Characterizing and influencing students' tendency to write self-explanations in online homework
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the context of online programming homework for a university course, we explore the extent to which learners engage with optional prompts to self -explain answers they choose for problems. Such prompts are known to benefit learning in laboratory and classroom settings [4], but there are less data about the extent to which students engage with them when they are optional additions to online homework. We report data from a deployment of self-explanation prompts in online programming homework, providing insight into how the frequency of writing explanations is correlated with different variables, such as how early students start homework, whether they got a problem correct, and how proficient they are in the language of instruction. We also report suggestive results from a randomized experiment comparing several methods for increasing the rate at which people write explanations, such as including more than one kind of prompt. These findings provide insight into promising dimensions to explore in understanding how real students may engage with prompts to explain answers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".