ExplainRoute: A Pre-Deployment Audit Framework for Non-Answer-Giving Programming Tutors

Abstract

Programming tutors should support learners'own explanations rather than immediately providing model answers. We present ExplainRoute, a pre-deployment audit framework for non-answer-giving programming tutors. Given a code line and a learner explanation, it estimates the explanation state and selects one of two bounded responses: a Feynman-style self-explanation prompt or a Socratic scaffold. The framework exposes its state, strategy, cited code fragment, and leakage risk through a machine-checkable contract. Unlike benchmarks that rank tutors by fluency alone, ExplainRoute audits information boundaries, response polarity, failure closure, and the value of learner-explanation visibility before classroom deployment. We evaluate it offline on the 1,770-pair SelfCode corpus using a code-group split, with 443 pairs reserved in 11 untouched holdout groups. The evaluation compares direct answers, fixed open self-explanation, fixed Socratic scaffolding, adaptive routing, and an adaptive no-state ablation. Contract validity reaches 100% for all pedagogical conditions. Adaptive routing matches the frozen reference rule on 60.5% of records, with state macro-F1 of 0.238 (Open: 0.229; Socratic: 0.246), showing no reliable adaptive advantage. An independent language-model judge scores adaptive responses 4.516/5, outperforming the no-state ablation (2.819/5) but slightly below fixed open self-explanation (4.598/5) and Socratic scaffolding (4.658/5). A blinded rubric evaluation on a stratified 40-row subset confirms that visible learner explanations improve information value while adaptive routing does not outperform fixed strategies. The contribution is a validated audit protocol and a boundary finding, rather than evidence of improved learning, retention, or causal instructional effectiveness.