MENTAL SET OR EINSTELLUNG OF PROGRAMMERS: A SURVEY OF STUDIES
Abstract and keywords
Abstract (English):
The Mental set effect (MS, Einstellung) is a tendency that immediately predisposes an organism to one type of motor or conscious action. MS affects people of various professions, including programmers. The purpose of the study is to expand the knowledge of programmers and programming teachers of MS, its influence on the work of programmers through a survey of scientific studies. The results of these studies were as follows. MS is one of the traps of a programmer's thinking. Having fallen into the trap, a programmer applies not the best solutions. Such solutions are found in the programs of modern students. When learning programming, half of the students exhibit MS. The sequence of tasks affects MS. The more experienced the programmers, the less often they exhibit MS, up to its overcoming. When redesigning introductory programming courses, it is necessary to take MS into account. Together with MS, functional fixity can affect, the manifestations of which are frequent among students. The surveyed studies made it possible to systematize their results, which can be used in further studies and practices, and study plans: their stages, used tasks, recommendations. Based on the analysis of the studies, we propose to reduce the effect of MS by expanding the knowledge of programmers of new approaches to solving problems, new ways of applying existing solutions, modern programming technologies, the MS itself, as well as expanding the general outlook of programmers; formulating tasks and their order of execution taking into account knowledge about MS; adapting programming courses in universities considering knowledge of the effect.

Keywords:
mental set, Einstellung, psychology, programming, software engineering, learning, psychological study, survey
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