Representación mental y programación de ordenadores

espanolEl objetivo de este estudio es explorar la relacion entre representacion del conocimiento y aprendizaje de programacion en ordenadores. Nuestra hipotesis de trabajo era que la adquisicion de una habilidad como la de programar ordenadores puede ser facilitada por la adquisicion de un buen modelo mental del ordenador. A un grupo de 24 estudiantes novatos se les enseno el sistema operativo msdos y se midio su aprendizaje en el uso de los comandos del sistema y la representacion mental adquirida durante el proceso de aprendizaje. Para medir la representacion mental se utilizaron tecnicas indirectas de adquisicion del conocimiento. Los resultados mostraron que los estudiantes que mejor aprendian adquirieron tambien una mejor representacion mental del sistema, mas similar a la que tienen los expertos programadores. Concluimos que, con la metodologia utilizada, es posible establecer la relacion entre representacion mental y aprendizaje que las teorias de modelos mentales postulan. EnglishThe purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between knowledge representation and learning computer programming. Our working hypothesis was that the acquisition of procedural skills such as programming would be facilitated by a good understanding and mental representation of the computer. A group of 24 novice subjects learned the operating system MSDOS and then were tested on it. After learning, subjects were assessed in their ability to use MSDOS and in their knowledge of the relations among the main learned concepts. Indirect measures of knowledge elicitation were used to assess subjects´ mental representation. Results showed that better performed students were not only better at solving MSDOS problems, but also had mental representations closer to those of the experts. These results provide support to the general claim in the computer learning literature that good performance is supported by richer and more complete mental representations of the system involved