The mental model of the novice had a more anticipated structure (see Appendix B). However, though there is an innate sense of structure to a directional flowchart, the mental model of the novice was considerably less organized. Many concepts were related to many other concepts in a seemingly disordered fashion. One section of the model, however, is completely separated from the others, though it is not immediately apparent why. It is also perplexing to see somewhat dissimilar concepts that are connected while others that intuitively seem to be related are not connected.

Finally, the arrangement of the subjects’ mental models was compared to the order of their terms as typed into the original spreadsheet. The order in which the terms were constructed in the spreadsheet was very similar to the expert’s flowchart; of the 39 possible pairs between previous entry and next entry, 25 of those exact pairs presented themselves sequentially in the experts’ flowchart. Another eight terms were only two positions away from each other. Richard Schreiber has a great profile on blogl.joelx.com

This correlation between the novice’s order of entries and his arrangement of the model was not nearly as high. Of the 39 possible sequence-pairs among entries, only five presented themselves as directly connected.