Dissertation Information for Susan Marie WiedenbeckNAME:
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SCHOOL: ADVISORS: COMMITTEE MEMBERS: MPACT Status: Complete - Except Indecipherables Title: SOME DETERMINANTS OF SKILLED PERFORMANCE IN PROGRAMMING Abstract: This research investigated skills which may contribute to expertise in programming. Two questions were explored. First, in comprehending programs do novices concentrate on syntax, while experts concentrate on program function? Second, are experts able to automate simple subcomponents of the programming task? In the first experiment novice and expert Fortran programmers were shown a series of simple, frequently-recurring code segments along with an English description (the prime). The prime was either syntactic or semantic and true or false. The subject had to decide whether the prime could apply to the code. Accuracy and reaction time were measured. Overall, experts were reliably faster and more accurate than novices. Both groups were faster at syntactic primes than at semantic primes, but novices were especially slow at semantic primes. In the second experiment novice and expert Fortran programmers were shown single lines of code which either contained a syntactic error or were completely correct. They had to decide whether the lines were correct. Accuracy and reaction time were measured. Experts were reliably faster and more accurate than novices. High accuracy and speed characterize automation of complex skills, so the results of both experiments support the hypothesis that experts automate simple subcomponents of the programming task, such as those represented in these experiments. The fact that novices were reliably slower than experts on semantic primes but not on syntactic primes suggests that novices are less adept than experts at organizing their knowledge around semantics, even when dealing with the simplest code. |
MPACT Scores for Susan Marie WiedenbeckA = 5 Advisors and Advisees Graph |