Hypermedia navigation: Profiles of hypermedia users

In this study we explored the use of log files as a window into the process of hypermedia navigation. Although there is a growing body of research addressing theoretical and design issues related to open-ended, non-directive technologies such as hypermedia, relatively few studies have attempted to explain navigational performance. Sixty-six undergraduate students used a multidimensional, computer-based kiosk that could be explored in a nonlinear fashion to find information in response to one of two information-retrieval tasks (simple or complex). Cluster analysis was used to generate performance profiles derived from navigational data captured in log files. Analyses of within-cluster performance profiles, combined with external validation criteria, led to the classification of four different types of navigational performance (models users, disenchanted volunteers, feature explorers, and cyber cartographers). These characterizations were consistent with information-retrieval scores and the external criteria (self-efficacy, perceived utility, and interest). For example, individuals who appeared to take the time to learn the layout of the kiosk also had the highest self-efficacy, while those who used the help screen and watched the most movies had the lowest self-efficacy. Results also demonstrated an interaction between various individual navigational profiles and type of information-retrieval task.     

Ally,friend, or mentor? Creating and maintaining effective cross-class alliances

This essay (re)examines the notion of intercultural alliances in one U.S. nonprofit organization trying to end poverty. The nonprofit, referred to as Transforming Poverty Partnerships, has built their program around building relationships between people in poverty and middle-class “Allies.” This analysis reveals a number of problematic themes that emerge from previous conceptions of cross-class alliances and implications for improving such alliances within various contexts.     

Where can your passport take you? Teaching citizenship,mobility, and identity

Courses: Intercultural Communication, Culture and Conflict, International Conflict and Alliance Building

Objectives: After completing this single-class activity, students should be able to (1) describe the concepts of identity, citizenship, and mobility; (2) empathize with the everyday struggles of students who hold citizenship outside of their “homeland”; and (3) explain how intersectionality influences an individual’s ability to traverse national borders.     

What do you recommend? Implementation and analyses of collaborative information filtering of web resources for education

This article examines results from one pilotstudy and two empirical studies of acollaborative filtering (CF) system applied ineducational settings. CF is a populartechnology in electronic commerce, whichleverages the interests of entire communitiesto provide targeted, personalizedrecommendations of interesting products orresources to individuals. In electroniccommerce, entertainment, and related domains,CF has proven an accurate and reliable tool;yet educational applications remain limited.From analyses of data from these three studies,we believe that CF holds promise in educationnot only for the purposes of helping learnersand educators find useful resources forlearning, but as a means of bringing togetherpeople with similar interests and beliefs, andpossibly as an aid to the learning processitself.     

Introduction: From digital dirt road to educational expressway: Innovations in web-based pedagogy

Instructional Science -     

An Exploratory Analysis of Differential Item Functioning and Its Possible Sources in a Higher Education Admissions Context

We analyzed a pool of items from an admissions test for differential item functioning (DIF) for groups based on age, socioeconomic status, citizenship, or English language status using Mantel-Haenszel and item response theory. DIF items were systematically examined to identify its possible sources by item type, content, and wording. DIF was primarily found in the citizenship group. As suggested by expert reviewers, possible sources of DIF in the direction of U.S. citizens was often in Quantitative Reasoning in items containing figures, charts, tables depicting real-world (as opposed to abstract) contexts. DIF items in the direction of non-U.S. citizens included “mathematical” items containing few words. DIF for the Verbal Reasoning items included geocultural references and proper names that may be differentially familiar for non-U.S. citizens. This study is responsive to foundational changes in the fairness section of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, which now consider additional groups in sensitivity analyses, given the increasing demographic diversity in test-taker populations.     

Domain knowledge and individual interest: The effects of academic level and specialization in statistics and psychology

Numerous research studies have highlighted the significant impact of domain knowledge and individual interest on learning. However, much of this prior research has neglected several important issues regarding the dynamic interplay of domain knowledge and individual interest both within and between domains as well as across developmental stages of learners. Situated within the Model of Domain Learning, this investigation seeks to respond to those issues. We studied the scores of 267 undergraduate and graduate students representing a variety of majors and programs. Results indicate that domain knowledge and individual interest are related differently for the domains of statistics and psychology. Further, findings indicate that when examining multiple domains of learning (e.g., statistics and psychology), the relationship between domain knowledge and interest changes as an artifact of both students’ academic level of preparation in undergraduate and graduate programs and their academic specialization. Based on these results, we offer implications for future research.     

Improving search via personalized query expansion using social media

Social tagging systems have gained increasing popularity as a method of annotating and categorizing a wide range of different web resources. Web search that utilizes social tagging data suffers from an extreme example of the vocabulary mismatch problem encountered in traditional information retrieval (IR). This is due to the personalized, unrestricted vocabulary that users choose to describe and tag each resource. Previous research has proposed the utilization of query expansion to deal with search in this rather complicated space. However, non-personalized approaches based on relevance feedback and personalized approaches based on co-occurrence statistics only showed limited improvements. This paper proposes a novel query expansion framework based on individual user profiles mined from the annotations and resources the user has marked. The underlying theory is to regularize the smoothness of word associations over a connected graph using a regularizer function on terms extracted from top-ranked documents. The intuition behind the model is the prior assumption of term consistency: the most appropriate expansion terms for a query are likely to be associated with, and influenced by terms extracted from the documents ranked highly for the initial query. The framework also simultaneously incorporates annotations and web documents through a Tag-Topic model in a latent graph. The experimental results suggest that the proposed personalized query expansion method can produce better results than both the classical non-personalized search approach and other personalized query expansion methods. Hence, the proposed approach significantly benefits personalized web search by leveraging users’ social media data.