Cognition and Perception Commons^™

The Stained Glass Of Knowledge: On Understanding Novice Mental Models Of Computing, Briana Christina Bettin

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Learning to program can be a novel experience. The rigidity of programming can be at odds with beginning programmer's existing perceptions, and the concepts can feel entirely unfamiliar. These observations motivated this research, which explores two major questions: What factors influence how novices learn programming? and How can analogy by more appropriately leveraged in programming education?

This dissertation investigates the factors influencing novice programming through multiple methods. The CS1 classroom is observed as a "whole system", with consideration to the factors present in it that can influence the learning process. Learning's cognitive processes are elaborated to ground exploration into specifically …

Metaphor And Analogy: The Sun And Moon Of Legal Persuasion, Linda L. Berger

Scholarly Works

Drawing on recent studies of social cognition, decision making, and analogical processing, this article recommends that lawyers turn to novel characterizations and metaphors to solve a particular kind of persuasion problem that is created by the way judges and juries think and decide. According to social cognition researchers, we perceive and interpret new information by following a process of schematic cognition, analogizing the new data we encounter to the knowledge structures embedded in our memories. Decision-making researchers differentiate between intuitive and reflective processes (System 1 and System 2), and they agree that in System 1 decision making, only the most …