Program comprehension and authentic measurement: a scheme for analysing descriptions of programs.

This paper describes an analysis scheme which was developed to probe the comprehension of computer programming languages by students learning to program. The scheme operates on free-form program summaries, i.e. textual descriptions of a program which are produced in response to minimal instructions by the researcher/experimenter. The scheme has been applied to descriptions of programs written in various languages, and it is felt that the scheme has the potential to be applied to languages of markedly different types (e.g. procedural, object-oriented, event-driven). The paper first discusses the basis for the scheme, before describing the scheme in detail, It then presents examples of the scheme's application, and concludes with a discussion of some open issues.