Dieser Technical Report dokumentiert zwei je einjährige Längsschnittstudien zur Veränderung der Planungskompetenz von 25 8/9- und 25 11/12-Jährigen in der ersten Studie und 32 Schülerinnen und Schülern in der zweiten Studie durch Programmierunterricht in der Programmiersprache LOGO. Die Studien konnten keine Veränderung in der Planungskompetenzen der Kinder im Vergleich zu Kontrollgruppen feststellen.

Our paper is a report on several studies that evaluate the empirical validity of these expectations for the general cognitive effects of learning to program. Like any empirical study, they require a finer grained focus than these overarching ideas will allow and,in this case, we have examined the development of planning skills in relation to learning to program in the Logo programming language (Abelson & diSessa, 1981; Papert, 1980). We will return to a discussion of the mental activities involved in programming and our choosing to study planning as a higher mental function after briefly sketching out the larger terrain in which these concepts have become embodied in educational practices.

Findings are presented from two separate year-long longitudinal studies of the development of planning skills among school aged children in relation to learning LOGO programming, and a theoretical context is provided for predictions of greater improvement by the programming groups. In the first year, experimental groups comprised students in each of two classrooms in a private school in Manhattan. One classroom included 25 8- and 9-year-old children; the other consisted of 25 11- and 12-year-old children. The control groups were made up of students in the same grade level classrooms in the same school. Both experimental groups were administered a classroom chore-scheduling planning task. Process and product measures of planning skill revealed no benefits for students doing LOGO programming. The second experiment took place one year later in the same school in the same two teachers' classrooms. The second study comprised 32 students in each of the age groups of the first study. This time a microcomputer version of the task was implemented in which students gave commands to a robot to carry out the chores, and similar assessments of planning performances were collected online. Again, learning to program did not differentiate experimental from control group performances. Further tests of the programming transfer hypothesis are proposed. Data tables and references are included.