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April 21, 2005
"Knowledge restructuring and the acquisition of programming expertise" by Simon P. Davies
This paper tries to introduce a model which would explain the development in expertise that separates an expert from a novice. The currently existing model associates schemata acquisition with skill development. However, in this paper they introduce a new model that emphasizes knowledge restructuring processes over schemata acquisition. The idea of knowledge restructuring processes is that the expert programmer would develop the focal points of the program first and then build the rest of the program around those points.
In order to support their model, they devised an experiment that consisted of three groups of equal size and different skill level. One group consisted of novices, another of intermediates, and the last being experts. Each group was presented with four Pascal programs and they had 10 minutes to study each program. After they have had a chance to study all four programs, they were presented with a series of 40 probe items that were either focal lines or non-focal lines. For each probe item they were asked to state whether the probe item was present in any of the four programs. The results revealed that experts had the highest percentage of correct results as well as the fastest response time, novices had the lowest percentage correct and the slowest response time, and intermediates were in the middle for both. The results also revealed that the differences in response time and percentage of correct answers were significant for focal lines, but not significant for non-focal lines. This basically supported their model by showing that experts are more aware of focal lines in a program since they build programs starting with focal points due to knowledge restructuring processes.
This paper is relevant to our research in regards to the results that show experts are more observant of focal lines in a program. This just shows us another way that differentiates an expert from a novice. By giving us a characteristic that differentiates the two groups, we can take note of it in our own experiment as well.
Posted by Teerawat at April 21, 2005 1:22 AM
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