USER MODELS AND MODELS OF HUMAN PERFORMANCE Essay

USER MODELS AND MODELS OF HUMAN PERFORMANCE - Essay Example One of the most thoroughly researched aspects of misconceptions is their resilience - they are hard to eliminate (Champagne, Klopfer, & Anderson, 1980; Larkin, 1983; as cited in Alexander, 1992). One cannot just make them go away by giving new information to students. Alexander (1992) attributes this to the complex networks of related information associated with misconceptions. This connection of misconceptions to information associated with a domain could cause students to alter other concepts too (Duschl & Hamilton, 1992). As students do not know that these misconceptions exist, they often work towards reinforcing them (Alexander, 1992). For example, while solving a problem, a student with misconceptions in algebra would try to create an alternative process that would conform to the misconceptions. In well-structured domains such as mathematics, computer programming, physics, and physical sciences, misconceptions have been researched consistently (Alexander, 1992). While misconceptions are not limited to some domains, not much research exists on why studies focused on well-structured domains or how the impact of misconceptions changes with domains. According to Alexander (1992), misconceptions have a "dispersive quality" - the more central a misconception is in a domain, the greater its impact on domain knowledge. According to Johnson (1986), programs written by novices with misconceptions reflect the misconceptions through characteristic bugs. Novices in C programming often use "=" for equality testing, rather than the required "= =" (Bull, S. et al., 2008). In C language, "=" is used to assign values and "= =" to compare for equality. Students who are new to C are likely to use "=" to compare values, as they learnt in mathematics and other programming languages. While the statement "If (x = y)†¦else†¦" is syntactically correct, the value of "y" is copied to "x". This happens