Facilitating Critiquing in Education: The Design and Implementation of the Java Critiquer

Individualized feedback is an important factor in fostering effective learning. However, it is often not seen in schools because providing it places a significant additional workload on teachers. One way to solve this problem is to employ critiquing tools, which offer students individualized coaching and just-in-time learning opportunities. This paper describes the Java Critiquer, a critiquing system to teach students how to write clean, maintainable and efficient code. The system uses a framework that can be customized to support educational critiquing in other domains. Preliminary results from a pilot test show that the Java Critiquer is capable of providing useful feedback to students as well as helpful support for teachers.