Organization of programming knowledge of novices and experts
Susan Wiedenbeck · Journal of the American Society for Information Science · 1986
This article reports on an experiment on the organization and use of programming knowledge. Novice and expert programmers made timed decisions about the structure and function of short and familiar FORTRAN code segments, similar to those in introductory programming textbooks. It was found that experts were faster and more accurate than novices, in spite of the simplicity of the materials. Functional decisions, which require analysis of the code, were slower than syntactic decisions for both groups, but were significantly slower for novices than for experts. This result suggests that the ability to extract and use functional information is characteristic of expertise in programming. Novices are less adept at using functional information, even when dealing with very small, simple programs appropriate to their own level of experience. The results of this study suggest that the difference between novice and expert programmers lies in the quality as well as the quantity of their knowledge. © 1986 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.