This report introduces the concept of a "metacourse"--i.e., the provision of mental models, problem solving strategies, key concepts, and other structures--to assist students in learning programming, and examines the effect of the use of such a metacourse on high school programming students. The experimental group consisted of 6 teachers who taught BASIC programming to 132 students at 5 high school laboratory sites, and the control group consisted of 9 teachers who taught 239 students at 8 control sites. The metacourse consisted of a series of eight instructional lessons interspersed throughout the semester. Students were given both pretests and posttests in cognitive skills, and observations of the experimental sites were also made. After examining these data, a second revised metacourse was developed and used with nine other teachers in seven new sites under conditions that more normally duplicate normal classroom innovations. The results showed that both the laboratory site and classroom site students who were exposed to the metacourse experienced significant improvement in their mastery of the BASIC programming language. However, the modest evidence of "transfer" skills found in the laboratory site was not evident in the second study under more normal classroom conditions. This suggests that transfer from programming is not normally obtained unless special efforts are made to explicitly design such elements into the intervention. Appended materials include the cognitive pretest/posttest, a test on BASIC, and a classroom observation worksheet. (34 references) (EW)