There seems to be a large contingent of people who learn almost exclusively by rote (this is not just in software engineering). A major problem they have is gen

There seems to be a large contingent of people who learn almost exclusively by rote (this is not just in software engineering). A major problem they have is generalizing that knowledge to other systems or other parts of the same system. See the many people who struggle to learn a new programming language. I have worked with people who were baffled by *nix systems (especially the terminal interfaces) because their comprehension of "folders" or "directories" was a strictly graphical one (usually based on Windows' model, but they could usually adapt to another file browser at least). They even struggled to interact with filesystems programmatically as a consequence. I've had some success helping people break out of this, but it usually boils down to individual motivation. These are the people I struggle to work with (in a mentoring/teaching capacity) the most because they get extremely frustrated by variations and novelty. Give them a well-written procedure, though, and they're usually good. Just hope there aren't any knowledge assumptions you made in writing it that don't hold.