Derek M Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
With regard to remembering what they have learned. Perhaps you
would be interested in running this
www.knosof.co.uk/cbook/accu06a.pdf experiment on your students.
I've printed that paper and read it carefully.
Some comments:
1. "parenthesis" is singular. The plural is "parentheses".
It's not an unusual pattern in English:
crisis/crises, amanuensis/amanuenses, analysis/analyses,
thesis/theses, axis/axes, arsis/arses (I refer of course
to a technical term in poetry).
"affect"/"effect" can also be found, and many others.
2. The experiment made use of deception: subjects were led
to believe that the experiment was about remembering the
values of variables from one side of the paper to the other.
"The answers" that "subjects [gave when] asked to ... list
any strategies they used" "all related to remembering information
about the assignment statements. There was no mention of
the parenthesis problem." This suggests that the subjects
may have regarded the actual experiment as an unimportant
distractor and not TRIED to perform it accurately.
3. C's bitwise operations are unusually, not to say unwisely, placed.
Page 8 of the PDF tells us that one subject commented on being
unfamiliar with << . We are given no reason to believe that that
subject was alone. At one time, 53% of developers were said to
use Visual Basic; perhaps the VB operators would have been, or
would be, a better should for such an experiment? In particular,
the anomalous results for the "%" operator are suspicious, and
the anomalous results for the "^" operator tend to suggest a
subject population more familiar with "^"-meaning-exponentiation
than "^"-meaning-exclusive-or.
4. I have some fairly serious statistical doubts about the analysis.
Most of them are technical, but one isn't: the results are based
on just 17 subjects. The fact that one subject out of the original
18 didn't understand the problem makes one wonder about the sample.
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