Transfer of Skills Among Programming Languages.

Abstract

Abstract : The general picture that has emerged from this research is one in which programming skill is to be conceived as translation from one surface representation to another. While the successful student will have this surface representation annotated with rich representation of its functionality, the skill is still quite specific to the notational details of the representations involved. The initial context for this research was set by two things supported by a prior API contract. One of these was the development of a general theory of transfer of cognitive skill, which could be conceived as a modern information-processing rendition of Thorndike's: theory of identical elements (Thorndike & Woodworth, 1901; Singley & Anderson, 1989). We showed that the degree of transfer could be predicted by the amount of overlap between knowledge structures in the ACT theory, which proposed that knowledge both consisted of procedural knowledge and declarative knowledge (Anderson, 1993). The other part of the research background for this project was the development of tutors for programming languages, particularly LISP (Anderson, Conrad, & Corbett, 1989). We wanted to generalize our understanding of both tutoring and of programming.