The work outlined here was inspired by a related one, where the authors analyze the mental models of recursion by looking at how students trace simple recursive computations. Besides trying to understand if their results generalize to a different context, I was interested to see the correlations between the mental models of the computation process and the ability to establish recursive relationships in the problem domain. My investigation essentially lends further support to those above findings. However, a consistent mental model of recursive computations, although implied by the ability to use recursion in problem-solving, does not seem to be suffcient for the achievement of this higher-level skill.
