ABSTRACT
By taking an information-processing approach to the teaching and learning of LOGO programming, we have been able to foster students’ high-level debugging skills such that they can be transfered to debugging tasks in nonprogramming contexts. In this chapter, we describe the highlights of our research program and attempt to integrate our findings with those of researchers with other perspectives. First, we specify a task analysis to make explicit the cognitive processes and knowledge necessary for debugging. We then report the results of two pilot studies showing that students in two different LOGO courses were not able to acquire effective debugging skills by discovery. Next, we present the debugging curriculum we designed, based on our task analysis, in an attempt to foster students’ learning. Finally, we describe the results of two studies assessing students’ acquisition and transfer of debugging skills after explicit instruction about the skill components. We contend that the specificity of our task analysis enabled us to design an effective curriculum for helping students to acquire debugging skills to such a degree that they were able to use them effectively even outside the programming domain.
