[Edu-sig] More on age

[Greg Ward]

On 07 February 2000, Gordon Worley said:
> Many of you seem to be ignoring the studies of psychologist (unless
> most of you are previously unfamilier with the studies that I'm about
> to mention).  While my HS book likes to be broad in mentioning studies
> (i.e. it doesn't give any way to learn about the specific experiments
> that it reads about), it happen to list the develop of cognative
> functions according to age.  Skipping a few ages, it has been found
> that people can generally not abstract information until they are
> circa 12 years old.

Interestingly, this lack of ability is not limited to the
pre-12-year-old set.  You don't have to spend much time on comp.lang.*
to realize that many, many people out there who are trying to program
(some of them, it seems, for money) who have a very limited ability for
abstract thinking and seem to construct most of their code as you say
you did before grade 9 -- ie. by example and cut 'n paste.

Just an observation -- and, by-the-by, probably the best argument in
favour of CP4E!

        Greg