Nancy Pennington
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Publications by Nancy Pennington (bibliography)
» 1995 «
Pennington, Nancy, Lee, Adrienne Y. and Rehder, Bob (1995): Cognitive Activities and Levels of Abstraction in Procedural and Object-Oriented Design. In Human-Computer Interaction, 10 (2) pp. 171-226
“The research reported in this article provides descriptions of design activities and of the evolving designs for expert procedural and expert object-oriented (OO) designers and for novice OO designers who also had extensive procedural experience. Ten experienced programmers were observed while designing software that would serve as a scoring system for swim meet competitions. Talk-aloud protocols were collected and analyzed for different types of cognitive activities and strategies that occurred during the course of design. In particular, we analyzed both the design activities and the level of abstraction of the designs over the course of time for each group in order to examine the role of several design strategies described in the literature as central in procedural design. In the course of these analyses, we developed a generic way (design template) of comparing the final designs of designers in different paradigms. Using this template, we analyzed the designs in terms of their completeness for different views at different levels of abstraction. Our analyses of procedural and OO designers -- in terms of their cognitive activities, design strategies, and final designs -- provide a detailed comparison between design paradigms in practice. A variety of descriptive results are discussed in terms of positive transfer, interference, and implications for design training. Findings are also discussed in terms of the relation between tasks and design paradigms.”
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» 1994 «
Lee, Adrienne Y. and Pennington, Nancy (1994): The Effects of Paradigm on Cognitive Activities in Design. In International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 40 (4) pp. 577-601
“This research examines differences in cognitive activities and final designs among expert designers using object-oriented and procedural design methodologies, and among expert and novice object-oriented designers, when novices have extensive procedural experience. We observed, as predicted by others, a closer alliance of domain and solution spaces in object-oriented design compared to procedural design. Procedural programmers spent a large proportion of their time analysing the problem domain. In contrast, object-oriented designers defined objects and methods much more quickly and spent more time evaluating their designs through simulation processes. Novices resembled object-oriented experts in some ways and procedural experts in others. Their designs had the general shape of the object-oriented experts' designs, but retained some procedural features. Novices were very inefficient at defining objects, going through an extensive situation analysis first, in a manner similar to the procedural experts. Some suggestions for instruction are made on the basis of novice object-oriented designers' difficulties.”
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» 1993 «
Lee, Adrienne Y. and Pennington, Nancy (1993): Learning Computer Programming: A Route to General Reasoning Skills?. In: Cook, Curtis, Scholtz, Jean and Spohrer, James C. (eds.) Empirical Studies of Programmers - Fifth Workshop December 3-15, 1993, 1993, Palo Alto, California. pp. 113-136.
“The learning of computer programming in schools has often been promoted as a basis for the learning of general thinking skills. Thus, a fundamental question about computer programming skill is whether it "transfers" to reasoning in other domains. Our research investigates whether expert diagnostic strategies will transfer spontaneously from established programming skill to another, unfamiliar domain. We then examine whether diagnostic reasoning can be taught to novices, in the context of learning to program, in a way that liberates the strategy from its content. The first experiment examined experienced subjects (extensive programming but no electronics) and inexperienced subjects (no programming or electronics) performances in two domains (programming and electronics) when domain specific information was provided. Results suggest that practicing a component of programming skill (debugging) will produce a general diagnostic skill that can transfer spontaneously across domains. The second experiment examined the training of inexperienced subjects for transfer. Experimental subjects learned more than controls, but did not show more transfer. More training may be necessary for subjects to reach advanced levels of the skill and thereby show transfer.”
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Rehder, Bob, Pennington, Nancy and Lee, Adrienne Y. (1993): A Scoring System for Software Designs. In: Cook, Curtis, Scholtz, Jean and Spohrer, James C. (eds.) Empirical Studies of Programmers - Fifth Workshop December 3-15, 1993, 1993, Palo Alto, California. p. 228.
“A system for scoring software designs produced in experimental settings is proposed and described. The system allows for a complete and multifaceted expression of a software design, making it ideal for comparing designs generated in different languages, paradigms, and methodologies. The system is able to characterize the different strengths (and weaknesses) that each design possess, and do so in a way that is "paradigm neutral", that is, is not unfairly biased towards one language, paradigm, or methodology. As a result of the thoroughness of this scoring system, a completeness score for a design may be computed which reflects the completeness of the design in an absolute sense. In addition, the scoring system characterizes each design component as being specified at a certain level of abstraction. Two different notions of level of abstraction, "level of refinement" and "level of decomposition", are compared. The scoring system allows for the representation of design alternatives and optional features, recognizing that software design problems are not sufficiently constrained to identify a unique solution. Techniques for scoring designs and generating dependent measures are described.”
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» 1991 «
Pennington, Nancy and Nicolich, Robert (1991): Transfer of Training Between Programming Subtasks: Is Knowledge Really Use Specific?. In: Koenemann-Belliveau, Jurgen, Moher, Thomas G. and Robertson, Scott P. (eds.) Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Workshop on Empirical Studies of Programmers 1991, Norwood, New Jersey, USA. pp. 156-176.
“The dominant theory of transfer of training is a theory of "common elements" based on Anderson's ACT* theory of skill acquisition (Singley & Anderson, 1989). In this theory, the knowledge acquired while learning a skill is encapsulated in procedures called production rules. Transfer between tasks is predicted to occur to the extent that the two tasks share production rules or "common elements." This leads to a principle of "use specificity of knowledge" which makes the strong statement that knowledge acquired in the practice of one subskill (such as writing a computer program) will not transfer to performance in a related subskill (such as understanding a computer program), even though the two subskills rest on a shared declarative knowledge base (such as definitions of programming language instructions) (McKendree & Anderson, 1987). Our research provides a test of the ACT* predictions of transfer and the use specificity principle, when considering transfer between two subtasks within the acquisition of computer programming skill. First we provide detailed a priori transfer predictions based on a task analysis and production system simulation model of two programming subtasks: the evaluation and generation of LISP instructions. Next, we present preliminary results from an empirical study of training and transfer between these two subtasks. Comparisons between empirical results and simulation predictions reveal that there is substantially more transfer between subtasks than was predicted. These results call into question either the principle of use specificity of knowledge or the ability to make a priori predictions within the ACT* framework. Current research is aimed at disentangling these two explanations.”
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» 1987 «
Pennington, Nancy (1987): Comprehension Strategies in Programming. In: Olson, Gary M., Sheppard, Sylvia B. and Soloway, Elliot (eds.) Empirical Studies of Programmers - Second Workshop December 7-8 1987, 1987, Washington, DC. pp. 100-113.
“This report focuses on differences in comprehension strategies between programmers who attain high and low levels of program comprehension. Comprehension data and program summaries are presented for 40 professional programmers who studied and modified a moderate length program. Illustrations from detailed think-aloud protocol analyses are presented for selected subjects who displayed distinctive comprehension strategies. The results show that programmers attaining high levels of comprehension tend to think about both the program world and the domain world to which the program applies while studying the program. We call this a cross-referencing strategy and contrast it with strategies in which programmers focus on program objects and events or on domain objects and events, but not both.”
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Mar 21st, 2010
Changes to this page (author)
24 Feb 2010: Enabled abstracts to be shown on Nancy Pennington's author page.28 Apr 2003: Added the author to the bibliography
