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Mental models of recursive computations vs. recursive analysis in the problem domain

Published: 06 July 2009 Publication History

Abstract

The work outlined here was inspired by [1, 3], where the authors analyze the mental models of recursion by looking at how students trace simple recursive computations. Besides trying to understand if their results generalize to a different context, I was interested to see the correlations between the mental models of the computation process and the ability to establish recursive relationships in the problem domain.
My investigation essentially lends further support to the findings of [3]. However, a consistent mental model of recursive computations, although implied by the ability to use recursion in problem-solving, does not seem to be sufficient for the achievement of this higher-level skill.

References

[1]
T. Goetschi, I. Sanders, and V. Galpin, "Mental models of recursion", In Proc. of the 34th SIGCSE, 2003.
[2]
D. Levy and T. Lapidot, "Recursively speaking: analyzing students' discourse of recursive phenomena", In Proc. of the 31st SIGCSE, 2000.
[3]
I. Sanders, V. Galpin, and T. Goetschi, "Mental models of recursion revisited", In Proc. of the 11th ITICSE, 2006.

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  • (2010)A Tangible Interface for Learning Recursion and Functional ProgrammingProceedings of the 2010 International Symposium on Ubiquitous Virtual Reality10.1109/ISUVR.2010.18(32-35)Online publication date: 7-Jul-2010

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  1. Mental models of recursive computations vs. recursive analysis in the problem domain

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ITiCSE '09: Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
    July 2009
    428 pages
    ISBN:9781605583815
    DOI:10.1145/1562877
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Published: 06 July 2009

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    Author Tags

    1. mental models
    2. programming learning
    3. recursion

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 552 of 1,613 submissions, 34%

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    • (2010)A Tangible Interface for Learning Recursion and Functional ProgrammingProceedings of the 2010 International Symposium on Ubiquitous Virtual Reality10.1109/ISUVR.2010.18(32-35)Online publication date: 7-Jul-2010

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