Adult students learning LOGO for the first time developed a series of misconceptions concerning the flow of control in their programs. Most errors consisted of violations of programming discourse or style conventions. Students with prior programming experience in BASIC developed a novel implementation of recursion in LOGO that reflected the iterative FOR … NEXT construct of BASIC. The origins of these violations of programming conventions were traced to general properties of cognition and also to specific instructional practices. Changes in instructional practices, implemented in a second study, reduced the general incidence of some types of errors. However, instances of negative transfer due to prior programming experience continued to occur.
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