Students with a semester or more of instruction often display remarkable naivety about the language that they have been studying and often prove unable to manage simple programming problems. The main purpose of this study was to create a set of problem-plan-program types for the BASIC programming language to help high school students build plans for unstructured BASIC programs with a schema induction intervention. With an experimental versus control group design and taking individual differences into analyses, this study was also aimed at investigating different functions of aptitudes and instructional treatments on computer programming learning. Treatment efficacy was assessed in terms of problem representation and problem solution of programming in card sorting tasks and performance tasks. Subjects were students from four high school computer programming classes. The results showed that inductive reasoning ability and treatment effect both contributed significantly to problem representation and problem solution of programming. The experimental group did better in card sorting tasks and performance tasks than the control group. The schema induction treatment proved to be effective. This study provides a learning framework for classes in computer programming. Results of the data analyses are displayed in 11 tables and 3 figures and a sample problem set is appended. (Contains 43 references.) (Author/BBM)