A COMPARISON BETWEEN HEURISTIC AND PROCEDURAL SOFTWARE TRAINING

In a field experiment with 40 participants, two different software training concepts were compared with respect to learning effects. Half of the subjects were trained with a conventional stepwise procedure according to the principles of programmed teaching by means of the use's manual. The other half underwent heuristic training derived from the principles of action theory. The latter consisted mainly of general information about the software structure and included some heuristics by which the program features could be actively explored. In a subsequent test, performance speed and error rate for a series of tasks were measured and, in addition, the knowledge about the software structure was tested by a structure comprehension technique. While the procedural training group displayed a higher performance speed during the test tasks, higher structural knowledge scores were found for the heuristic training group, revealing a more adequate mental model of the software.