Abstract

The classical assumption that plans control actions has been challenged. Suchman, a protagonist of situated cognition theory, posits that plans serve only as prospective and retrospective representations of situated actions, but do not determine the actual courses concerned. With the aim to verify Suchman's claims, an experiment was conducted with 35 university students of different programming expertise. The results showed that the effects of plans on program design were related to the level of programming expertise whereas no effects of plans on program debugging could be detected. Besides, planned actions and ad hoc actions contributed to program design to similar extent whereas situated debugging was the predominant debugging strategy. The findings refute Suchman's deemphasis on the role of plans during cognitive activities. Grounded in Dewey's and Gibson's theories, a Model of planning specific to program design and program debugging has been developed