Prior research has identified two psychological processes that appear to be used by
programmers when they perform design and coding tasks:(a) taxonomizing—identifying the …

Program debugging can be an expensive, complex and frustrating process. Conventional
programming environments provide little explicit support for the cognitive tasks of diagnosis …

This paper reports the results of an exploratory study that investigated expert and novice
debugging processes with the aim of contributing to a general theory of programming …

Programming may be more difficult than necessary because it requires solutions to be
expressed in ways that are not familiar or natural for beginners. To identify what is natural …

We present a brief overview of a model for the human cognitive architecture and three
learning theories based on this model: cognitive load theory, cognitive apprenticeship, and …

Comprehension strategies in programming | Empirical studies of programmers: second
workshop skip to main content ACM Digital Library home ACM home Google, Inc. (search) …

We present results of observing professional maintenance engineers working with industrial
code at actual maintenance tasks. Protocol analysis is used to explore how code …

Program design, from initial idea to executable code, was studied in a group of novice (first
programming course) and a group of intermediate (second course) student programmers …

Comprehension of computer programs involves identifying important program parts and
inferring relationships between them. The ability to comprehend a computer program is a …

Programming a computer is a complex, cognitively rich process. This paper examines ways
in which human cognition is reflected in the text of computer programs. We concentrate on …