Teaching for Transfer of Problem-Solving Skills to Computer Programming

Abstract

Computer programming is a problem-solving activity that requires transfer of training to programming problems that were not taught. Three effective methods for promoting transfer are to provide conceptual models of the computer during instruction, to pretrain the users in relevant prerequisite skills such as comprehending a list of directions, and to encourage users to develop the problem solving strategies of experts such as breaking a problem into separate parts. These instructional methods improved problem-solving performance substantially over conventional instruction. The results are consistent with Singley and Anderson's [27] theory of specific transfer of general skills.