CiteULike is a free online bibliography manager. Register and you can start organising your references online.
Tags

Structured flowcharts outperform pseudocode: an experimental comparison

by: D. A. Scanlan
Software, IEEE, Vol. 6, No. 5. (1989), pp. 28-36, doi:10.1109/52.35587  Key: citeulike:831996

Formatted Citation


Show HTML

Likes (beta)

This copy of the article hasn't been liked by anyone yet.

View FullText article


Abstract

The author discovered, while teaching a course on data structures, that his students overwhelmingly preferred structured flowcharts over pseudocode for comprehending the algorithms presented. He describes an experiment that he designed to find out if real differences in comprehension exist between structured flowcharts and pseudocode when used to describe conditional logic. He hypothesized that structured flowcharts (1) take less time to comprehend, (2) produce fewer errors in understanding, (3) give students more confidence in their understanding of an algorithm, (4) reduce the time spent answering questions about an algorithm, and (5) reduce the number of times students need to look at an algorithm. These hypotheses were tested on three algorithms of varying complexity. The results strongly indicate that structured flowcharts do indeed aid algorithm comprehension. A large difference was found even for the simplest algorithm.>


fredpyo's tags for this article

Citations (CiTO)

No CiTO relationships defined

X There are no reviews yet

X Find related articles from these CiteULike users

X Find related articles with these CiteULike tags

X Posting History


X Export records

Privacy Statement | Terms & Conditions
CiteULike organises scholarly (or academic) papers or literature and provides bibliographic (which means it makes bibliographies) for universities and higher education establishments. It helps undergraduates and postgraduates. People studying for PhDs or in postdoctoral (postdoc) positions. The service is similar in scope to EndNote or RefWorks or any other reference manager like BibTeX, but it is a social bookmarking service for scientists and humanities researchers.