THE ACQUISITION OF OPERATING-SYSTEMS CONCEPTS BY COMPUTER-SCIENCE STUDENTS

Students following an operating systems course often experience difficulties in mastering complex abstract concepts, such as concurrency, scheduling of processes and deadlock. The dining philosophers problem served as an example in demystifying many such difficulties. An experiment was designed in which students were tested on their knowledge of the dining philosophers problem after being exposed to a treatment program in which traditional textbook study methods in comparison to computer-assisted instructional methods were used. The results indicated that CAI techniques in this application do not guarantee an easier acquisition of knowledge than with conventional texts, particularly in relation to abstract concepts.