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Understanding students' errors with Prolog unification

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Abstract

One of the mechanisms that a student of Prolog must learn to understand and to use is unification. Initially students have only a partial understanding of unification and therefore they are not able to fully understand the execution of a program. This paper shows that a considerable part of the errors that students make can be explained by an impaired version of the correct algorithm. The changes from the correct algorithm to the false algorithms can be justified by a psychologically plausible mechanism.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social Science Informatics, University of Amsterdam, Roetersstraat 15, 1018 WB, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Maarten W. Van Someren

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  1. Maarten W. Van Someren
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Van Someren, M.W. Understanding students' errors with Prolog unification. Instr Sci 19, 361–376 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00116445

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00116445

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