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The Influence of Color-Enhanced and Graphical Information Presentation in Decision Making

Published: 01 July 1987 Publication History

Abstract

Two experiments were performed to study students' ability to write recursive and iterative programs and transfer between these two skills. They wrote functions to accumulate instances into a list. Problems varied in terms of whether they were recursive or iterative, whether they operated on lists or numbers, whether they accumulated results in forward or backward manner, whether they accumulated on success or failure, and whether they simply skipped or ejected on failure to accumulate. Subjects had real difficulty only with the dimensions concerned with flow of control--namely, recursive versus iterative, and skip versus eject. We found positive transfer from writing iterative functions to writing recursive functions, but not vice versa. A subsequent protocol study revealed subjects had such a poor mental model of recursion that they developed poor learning strategies which hindered their understanding of iteration. It is argued that having an adequate model of the functionality of programming is prerequisite to learning to program and that it is sensible pedagogical practice to base understanding of recursive flow of control on understanding iterative flow of control.
  1. The Influence of Color-Enhanced and Graphical Information Presentation in Decision Making

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    cover image ACM SIGCHI Bulletin
    ACM SIGCHI Bulletin  Volume 19, Issue 1
    July 1987
    46 pages
    ISSN:0736-6906
    DOI:10.1145/28189
    Issue’s Table of Contents

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 01 July 1987
    Published in SIGCHI Volume 19, Issue 1

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