Refute: An Alternative to ‘Explain in Plain English’ Questions

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). ICER 2021, August 16–19, 2021, Virtual Event, USA © 2021 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-8326-4/21/08. https://doi.org/10.1145/3446871.3469791 analyzing student answers to “Explain in Plain English” (EiPE) [12] (or “Explain in your own words” [5]) questions. In line with Xie et al.’s theory of instruction for introductory programming [13], such questions can be used as summative and formative items [3] to assess code reading skills. However, we highlight four concerns with EiPE questions, and we propose an alternative question type – Refute (Figure 1) – that seeks to address these concerns.