Worked examples, which present an explained code for solving typical programming problems are among the most popular types of learning content in programming classes. Most approaches and tools for presenting these examples to students are based on line-by-line explanations of the example code. However, instructors rarely have time to provide…

This paper systematically explores how Large Language Models (LLMs) generate explanations of code examples of the type used in intro-to-programming courses. As we show, the nature of code explanations generated by LLMs varies considerably based on the wording of the prompt, the target code examples being explained, the programming language, the…

Computational tools and resources play an important role for vocabulary acquisition. Although a large variety of dictionaries and learning games are available, few resources provide information about the complexity of a word, either for learning or for comprehension. The idea here is to use frequency counts combined with intralexical variables to…

Although a reader's text-level comprehension is affected by the comprehension of individual sentences in a text, little attention has been paid to the difficulty of sentences. This study investigates whether measures (features) of text difficulty affect the "gradience" observed in sentence difficulty judgments. We examine two traditional…