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2024 Microsoft University of Michigan

Supporting Novice Data Science Learners through Personalized Feedback

This project explored novice data science learners' common errors and misconceptions, and built a feedback-generation system that automatically identifies what went wrong to deliver personalized hints, at scale.

Methods

Analysis of programming logs + Qualitative analysis of incorrect submissions
Instructor interviews
Automatic feedback generation tool developed at Microsoft
Course Deployment at University of Michigan
Collected student feedback and shared with Microsoft

My Contributions

  • Bridged collaboration between University of Michigan and Microsoft, led data sharing and helped both teams understand each other's domains and methodologies.
  • Worked with cross-functional team of engineers, product managers, and researchers at Microsoft to advance their understanding of online learning and data science pedagogy.
  • Developed taxonomy of data science programming mistakes to enabled scalable, personalized support.
  • Shared findings with executive stakeholders at Microsoft to help improve data science developer tools.

Impact

  • Deployed across 2 semesters of the Master of Applied Data Science program at the University of Michigan.
  • Enabled real-time support on programming assignments, which was previously unavailable to asynchronous online learners in the program.