Towards an Assessment Rubric for EiPE Tasks in Secondary Education: Identifying Quality Indicators and Descriptors

The ability to explain program code has shown to correlate with code writing skills. Explain in Plain English (EiPE) tasks have the potential to serve as learning activities, in order to develop and enhance skills that are critical for programming (e.g., program comprehension and abstraction). However, assessing students’ work and providing clear feedback on these tasks can be challenging, as quality indicators are not well established.

This work aims to fill this gap by investigating indicators and descriptors which characterize the quality of students’ code explanations in secondary education. Firstly, we carried out a literature review to identify quality characteristics and descriptors that differentiate the quality of students’ responses in tertiary education. Then, we analyzed the quality of upper-secondary students’ responses to a simple EiPE task. The results of that analysis were used to refine our quality characteristics and descriptors, which were then translated into a prototypical rubric. In the final phase, the rubric was iteratively tested by two teachers and improved based on their feedback. The final rubric prototype can be used to provide feedback during formative assessment.