Development of a Diagnostic Tool for the Validity of Multiple-Choice Blank-Filling Questions for Learning Algorithms with C Programming Language

In many programming educations, as a means of checking learner's comprehension relatively easily than code description, an assignment in the form of closed-ended questions is presented. The closed-ended question is not a task to create all the source code from scratch, but to create sources using pre-supplied materials. Closed-ended questions include the completion of some statements, reordering of some statements, and template modification. When giving the learning task with closed-ended questions, the instructor usually has to design the problem-solving procedure in advance by only himself. At this time, it is important to prevent unintended correct answers due to the instructor's oversight, but this task is not easy. Therefore, in this study, we focus on multiple-choice blank-filling questions as a closed-ended question and develop a diagnostic tool to confirm its adequacy. As a result of practice, our diagnostic tool could find correct answers that the instructor could not have noticed and behaviors specific to the C language.