YuxiLiuWired

> Seven children (two girls and five boys, eleven- to twelve-years-old) in their second year of Logo programming participated in the study. The children were highly motivated to learn Logo programming, and had averaged over fifty hours of classroom programming time under the supervision of experienced classroom teachers knowledgeable in the Logo language, who followed the "discovery" logo pedagogy set out by Papert [3]. All seven children had received instruction in iteration and recursion, and had demonstrated in their classroom programming that they could use iteration and recursion in some contexts

To those who don't get what "discovery" method implies, it is proposed by Seymour Papert, a pioneer of computer pedagogy, based on the constructionist theory of learning. It posits that students learn best when they are actively engaged in constructing their own knowledge and understanding through the creation of personally meaningful artifacts or projects. They would be on their own, writing programs with minimal guidance, developing their own intuitive understanding of how programs operate.

I don't know what was Papert's intention, as I never read his book Mindstorms in full, but from what I read, I think 20% probability he believed that the "stack" concept would be discovered by children, and 80% probability he believed that children should be allowed to discover concepts on their own, even if they "misunderstand" the nature of computer programming, because there is no nature, except what we construct of them, and so there is nothing to "misunderstand". He is a radical constructivist in pedagogy.

Notably, in the study, the children were receiving instructions (though what kind of instruction, the authors didn't say). It was discovered that pure discovery learning is extremely inefficient, and so most actual discovery learning programs were not "pure", but included extensive instruction, or guidance. See for example Mayer, R. E. (2004). Should There Be a Three-Strikes Rule Against Pure Discovery Learning? American Psychologist, 59(1), 14–19.

I actually was thinking of adding this study somewhere in my post on the Perceptron Controversy, but don't have a good place to place it.