Frank Wales wrote: > Bjorn Reese wrote: >> The students used longer titles, such as "count number of >> occurrences" and "find if any element is of some sort", whereas the >> professionals used short titles, such as "count" and "find". >> >> This could indicate that the looping constructs belong to the >> basic-level category (Rosch, 1978) of the professionals but not >> of the student. > > Or it could mean that the students were in the habit of being > overly verbose in answering questions, since terseness is generally > not rewarded in exams, while it often is rewarded in business.
This is a good observation. The study was not designed to investigate this issue. The subjects were only asked to give a descriptive title so that I could check that they knew what the loop was doing. The difference in title length was an unexpected outcome, and the basic-level category comment is best speculation I could come up with. I just went back and read the questionnaire responses once more. The questionnaire had a number of questions where the subjects were asked to describe something in their own words. The verbosity of the students and the professionals on these other questions are about the same, so I somewhat doubt that the difference on the loop titles is due to the different reward systems as you suggest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List (discuss@ppig.org) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/
