Abstract

Experienced structured programmers often find it difficult to learn object oriented techniques. At the root of this difficulty is the phenomenon of cognitive interference: a student’s prior knowledge actively interferes with the learning of the new skill. This paper describes cognitive interference, its impact on the learning of OO programming, and our method of circumventing this interference. A preliminary field experiment was conducted to test this method. The results indicate that through the use of quantum shift learning techniques the students were able to shift from structured thinking to object oriented thinking without cognitive interference.

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