My guess is that "denotational strategies" (from what I can guess you mean) just move the cognitive load around in other places. That doesn't make them worse, but it depends on which kind of cognitive load the learner best copes with.
Agreed that the lack of evidence makes any of my claims not much more than hot air. It's something I'm interested in rectifying but I'm not sure how to do in our context (professional training and free intro to programming).
Comments
Maybe. I don't believe any claims about "easier" without reasonable experimental evidence. Even in the realm of operational strategies, there are huge differences; see: http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/tfk-ev...
My guess is that "denotational strategies" (from what I can guess you mean) just move the cognitive load around in other places. That doesn't make them worse, but it depends on which kind of cognitive load the learner best copes with.
Agreed that the lack of evidence makes any of my claims not much more than hot air. It's something I'm interested in rectifying but I'm not sure how to do in our context (professional training and free intro to programming).