How should we ‘Explain in plain English’? Voices from the Community

“Explain in plain English” (EipE) questions are seen as an important developmental activity and assessment tool in the research community studying how people learn to program, but they aren’t widely used in practice because of difficulty of grading and workload issues. In this paper, we interviewed eleven members of the introductory programming education research community about their thoughts on EipE questions as a whole and how individual borderline student answers should be graded. Through inductive coding of the interview transcripts, we identify: (1) themes relating to how EipE questions should be used in class, (2) the importance of training students to complete EipE questions, (3) standards for the selection and presentation of code in EipE questions, (4) the theoretical and practical considerations relating to grading EipE questions, and (5) English as a second language (ESL) concerns. In addition, we attempt to extrapolate from our observations what the underlying grading process is that faculty are using to grade EipE questions.