Douglas Selent
selentd@uwplatt.edu
I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Wisconsin - Platteville. I have worked in the areas of Computer Science and Learning Science with Neil Heffernan and the ASSISTments online learning platform, building systems to help improve student learning and analyze experiments more effectively. I have created a system called PeerASSIST, which crowdsources and redistributes student work in a controlled and optimal manner to peers in need of assistance. This system has been used by 60 teachers and 600 students who have generated over 300,000 instances of which over 2,000 have been redistributed to peers in need of assistance. I have also contributed to the Assessment of Learning Infrastructure (ALI) project, which provides a platform to automatically analyze and report on experiment results to researchers.
I have developed a machine-learning algorithm to learn the incorrect processes students make from their answers and the inputs of the problem. I created text and video "buggy messages" (feedback targeted at specific incorrect answers) for these incorrect processes and conducted several randomized controlled experiments in the ASSISTments system using these buggy messages to help students learn from their mistakes. There were some interesting observations that came from these experiments. Students who give an incorrect but common wrong answer will answer the next question correctly ~80% of the time. Students who give an incorrect but uncommon wrong answer will rarely answer the next question correctly.
Currently I am working with students and faculty to develop high-quality test suites to automatically grade and provide immediate and informative feedback for programming assignments. In the summer of 2021, a team of three students, under the guidance of myself and another instructor, created test suites for all of the programming assignments in our Introduction to Computer Programming course. In the fall of 2021, over 18,000 student submissions were automatically graded. In the summer of 2022, we are planning to recruit another team of three students to develop test suites for all of the programming assignments in our Object-Oriented Programming course.
In my free time, I have programmed over 750K lines of code and created several applications. I focus on producing high quality, understandable, maintainable, extendable, easy-to-use code.
I liked to teach and have taught several graduate and undergraduate Computer Science courses at Rivier University and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. I currently teaching at the University of Wisconsin - Platteville. I teach Computer Science and Software Engineering courses as well as teamwork and persistence.