Dr. Douglas Selent

Dr. Selent earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, his Master of Science in Computer Science from Rivier University, and his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Merrimack College.

Doug has 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.  He has 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.  He has also contributed to the Assessment of Learning Infrastructure (ALI) project, which provides a platform to automatically analyze and report on experiment results to researchers.

Doug has also developed a machine-learning algorithm to learn the incorrect processes students make from their answers and the inputs of the problem.  He 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.

Doug is currently 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 summer of 2022, a second team of three students created test suites for all of the programming assignments in our Object-Oriented Programming course. The student teams generated nearly 200K lines of code, provided feedback to over 18,000 student submissions in one semester and saved instructors numerous hours grading.

In his free time, Doug has programmed over a million lines of code and has created several applications.  He focuses on producing high quality, understandable, maintainable, extendable, easy-to-use code.