Prior Experience and New IT Students

The Prior Experience of Entering CS Students

One of the foremost issues for instructors of “Introduction to Programming” or “CS1” courses is the diversity of students’ backgrounds – on one end of the range, a significant portion of students start their computing degree without prior programming expertise, while on the other end, many students have even worked in a job where programming was a substantial part. This diversity makes it diffi...

Generating Motivation in New Students of It ‡

The recent expansion of Higher Education has produced a number of effects that are well known to practitioners-one that is widely quoted is that the modern student comes under-equipped and under-prepared to negotiate the schemes of study that seem to have functioned well for years; this is often interpreted as a shortage of motivation. and we report here on a novel attempt to solve it by the in...

Prior experience supports new learning of relations in aging.

This work examined whether semantically relevant schemas could facilitate learning in the transverse patterning (TP) task, which requires participants to learn the value of each stimulus in relation to the stimulus with which it is paired (e.g., A wins over B, B wins over C, C wins over A). Younger and older adults received the standard TP in isolation (alone condition), with additional session...

Prior experience and complex procedures.

The role of prior knowledge in learning complex procedures was investigated in a transfer task in which subjects learned two related procedures in sequence. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the conceptual and structural similarity between the two procedures; in Experiment 2, we manipulated whether the order of the steps within subprocedures was the same or different during training and transfer,...

Blinded by Experience: Prior Experience, Negative News and Belief Updating