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Guardrails or Roadblocks? Effects of Pedagogical Style and Context Awareness in AI Teaching Assistants for Programming

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 24, 2026 · UTC

AI teaching assistants (AI TAs) backed by large language models (LLMs) and pedagogical guardrails are increasingly being integrated into programming courses, providing students with scalable access to hints, conceptual explanations, and code-level feedback. However, guardrails may also create friction. If students feel that the support provided is overly restrictive or poorly contextualized to their current progress, they may bypass approved tools for general-purpose LLMs. To investigate how AI TA design affects students' learning experiences, we conducted a randomized controlled trial with 13

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