TRAINING OF PASCAL NOVICES ERROR HANDLING ABILITY

The present study reports on the effects of providing novices in Pascal one hour of training in the debugging of their own programs. The training presented subjects with results from previous research on novices' debugging as well as fairly detailed instructions on how to debug a program. Furthermore, the instructions included explanations of common error messages from the computer. The debugging performed by the eleven subjects who received training was compared with the debugging performed by ten control subjects who programmed on their own during the training hour. The results show that the subjects who received training debugged a significantly larger proportion of their errors compared with subjects who received no training. The results suggest that especially the semantic programming errors were easier to debug for the trained group. No differences in detailed debugging behaviour were found between the groups.