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Record W7160855074 · doi:10.69987/jacs.2025.50902

Performance Evaluation of Prompt Generation Strategies for AI Agents in Online Programming Education

2025· article· W7160855074 on OpenAlex
Zan Li, Zijie Chen

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Advanced Computing Systems · 2025
Typearticle
Language
FieldComputer Science
TopicTeaching and Learning Programming
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPython (programming language)Hybrid learningOnline learningTracking (education)Empirical researchCognition

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The integration of artificial intelligence agents in online programming education has revolutionized how students receive instructional support and feedback. This research investigates the performance evaluation of different prompt generation strategies employed by AI agents to assist programming learners. The study examines three distinct prompt generation approaches: rule-based progressive prompting, data-driven adaptive prompting, and hybrid context-aware prompting. Through a controlled experimental design involving 180 undergraduate students enrolled in introductory Python programming courses, we evaluated these strategies across multiple performance dimensions including learning effectiveness, engagement metrics, code completion rates, and student satisfaction. Quantitative analysis revealed that the hybrid context-aware prompting strategy achieved superior learning outcomes with normalized gains averaging 0.51 compared to data-driven (0.42) and rule-based approaches (0.35). The evaluation framework incorporated behavioral analytics, cognitive load measurements, and longitudinal performance tracking over an eight-week period. Results demonstrate significant variations in strategy effectiveness based on student proficiency levels, problem complexity, and learning contexts. This research contributes empirical evidence for optimizing AI agent design in educational technology and provides practical guidelines for implementing adaptive prompting mechanisms in programming learning environments.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.008
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.523
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0080.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.060
GPT teacher head0.389
Teacher spread0.329 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it