- Title
- Multiple-choice vs free-text code-explaining examination questions
- Creator
- Simon,; Snowdon, Susan
- Relation
- 14th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research . Proceedings of the 14th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research (Koli, Finland 20-23 November, 2014) p. 91-97
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2674683.2674701
- Publisher
- Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2014
- Description
- The BRACElet project has developed a number of code-explaining questions and thoroughly researched the novice programmer's difficulty in answering them correctly. In a prior study we explored whether students might perform better on multiple-choice code-explaining questions than on free-text code-explaining questions, and concluded that the multiple-choice form led to a perceptible but generally insignificant improvement in students' performance. However, that study compared different cohorts of students, leaving some doubt over its validity. In this study we seek to find a more definitive answer by including multiple-choice and free-text code-explaining questions in the same exam, and comparing the performances of individual students on the question pairs. We find that students perform substantially and significantly better on the multiple-choice questions. In the light of this finding we reconsider the question: when students cannot correctly describe the purpose of a small piece of code, is it because they do not understand the code; because they understand its detail but are unable to abstract that detail to determine the purpose; or because they understand the purpose but are unable to express it?
- Subject
- introductory programming; computing education; code-explaining questions; multiple choice
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1297448
- Identifier
- uon:19449
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781450330657
- Language
- eng
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