The more I've taught math, the more convinced I am that getting people to "think about what they mean", and to think about what mathematical words mean is 90% of the project.
I remember reading long ago (I'd love to find it again) about a CS department that gave a quiz to incoming students that was very predictive of their success. The answers they wrote didn't matter; what mattered was whether their answers evinced consistent meaning applied to terms and operations.
It's a bit more complicated than "debunked/retracted", as that second document explains:
> Dehnadi, to his credit, stuck to his guns and did the meta-analysis that showed that he’d discovered a phenomenon and that his test was a worthwhile predictor.
The original paper contained several linked claims: that there is an ability to make consistent mental models, that it's intrinsic and fixed, that it predicts ability to program, and that few people have it, and hence few people can learn to program. AIUI, the debunked/retracted claims are that it's intrinsic and fixed, and that few people have it. It looks like the ability exists, but it can be learned, and it is linked to programming ability.
Which i think does line up with wcarey's point:
> The more I've taught math, the more convinced I am that getting people to "think about what they mean", and to think about what mathematical words mean is 90% of the project. [...] The answers they wrote didn't matter; what mattered was whether their answers evinced consistent meaning applied to terms and operations.
I won't go back and edit my comment, but what you say is true. There really is an interesting thing going on here, even if the original paper was an over-reach.
> In autumn 2005 I became clinically depressed. My physician put me on the then-standard treatment for depression, an SSRI. But she wasn’t aware that for some people an SSRI doesn’t gently treat depression, it puts them on the ceiling. I took the SSRI for three months, by which time I was grandiose, extremely self-righteous and very combative – myself turned up to one hundred and eleven. I did a number of very silly things whilst on the SSRI and some more in the immediate aftermath, amongst them writing “The camel has two humps”. I’m fairly sure that I believed, at the time, that there were people who couldn’t learn to program and that Dehnadi had proved it. The paper doesn’t exactly make that claim, but it comes pretty close. Perhaps I wanted to believe it because it would explain why I’d so often failed to teach them. It was an absurd claim because I didn’t have the extraordinary evidence needed to support it. I no longer believe it’s true.
I remember reading long ago (I'd love to find it again) about a CS department that gave a quiz to incoming students that was very predictive of their success. The answers they wrote didn't matter; what mattered was whether their answers evinced consistent meaning applied to terms and operations.