Teaching procedural literacy (Presentation Abstract)

The naive way to teach a skill is to teach the surface characteristics of its expert performance. The cost of this naivete, however, is that one eventually runs afoul of both the genetic dependencies between sub-skills and the need to capture (and teach) the relationships between the various expert behaviors. Sooner or later, a transition to a more “deep structured” approach must be made.

Programming instruction is currently making such a transition. Traditional methods of instruction in terms of surface characteristics of the programming task, such as specific computers and programming languages, are gradually yielding to less media dependent treatment of programming as a problem of structured design (Floyd, 1979). However, while these more abstract design issues are essential concerns of the professional systems engineer, the orientation of basic programming instruction around them is simply moving our focus from one aspect of expert performance to another. This would be tenable were our concern primarily the training of computer professionals but, while we have been developing our understanding of programming, the spread of computing has changed the motivation for programming instruction. What was once professional education has become an important component of literacy.