A chain of cognitive changes with learning to program in Logo.

Investigated 3 kinds of changes that could occur when a child learns to program in Logo: changes in the child's knowledge of the specific features of the Logo language, changes in the child's thinking within the domain of programming, and changes in the child's thinking in domains beyond programming. Novice programmers for 4th-grade classes were given three sessions of Logo learning, with a Logo test given after each session, and a test of spatial cognition given before and after learning. Children showed a general increase in their knowledge of Logo across the three sessions, as indicated by increasing proportions of correct answers on the Logo test. Children showed a reduction in their misconceptions related to Logo, namely, egocentric bugs such as thinking "turn right" means to turn to the right side of the screen rather than to the turtle's right, and interpretation bugs such as thinking "turn right" means to turn and then keep moving. Children who lost their egocentric misconceptions or who never had them showed pretest-to-posttest gains on a test of spatial cognition, whereas egocentric children did not. Results provide some preliminary evidence that productive learning of a programming language involves a chain of cognitive changes, with lower-level changes facilitating higher-level changes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)