Content and representation effects with reasoning tasks in PROLOG form

Towards a taxonomy of novices' misconceptions of the Prolog interpreter

“…This 'meta-analysis' has been noted by Taylor (1987) and Ormerod (1986), as discussed earlier, and corroborated by Rajan (1986), who found students used 'real-world' reasoning to arrive at an answer, rather than following through the execution of the interpreter. Similarly, Fang (1987b) found that novices could frequently arrive at a correct answer without being able to correctly specify the way that Prolog would actually derive it.…”

“…The particular choice of example itself can also result in further real world knowledge being brought incorrectly to bear. Ormerod (1986) studied the use of the 'family tree hierarchy', commonly used in introductory textbooks. He was able to show that this particular example often leads to the user making errors due to in the inclusion of assumptions based on their own knowledge of family genealogy, rather than purely the logical statements in front of them.…”