These papers describe efforts toward the systematic improvement of a software environment called SOLO (Eisenstadt, 1978), which has been used with cognitive psychology students at the Open University in Great Britain and is geared towards the manipulation of assertional databases. The first paper, by Eisenstadt, Laubsch, and Kahney, provides an introduction and background information about SOLO, followed by descriptions of empirical studies undertaken to analyze students' programming behavior, which have highlighted the use of a small number of programming schemas by a large proportion of students. These schemas serve as a basis for an automated debugging assistant, which is also described. Seven references are listed. The second paper, by Laubsch and Eisenstadt, describes recent progress in the design and implementation of the debugging assistant which was designed for novice programmers learning to use a simple assertional database language. Oriented towards a large audience of computer-naive users, this system deals with argument passing, recursion, and side-effects. Specific topics discussed are (1) deriving effect descriptions by symbolic evaluation; (2) matching the effect description with a domain-specific library plan; and (3) comparing effect descriptions of user plans with library plans. Ten references are listed. (Author/LMM)