The effects of instruction on situation model construction: an eye fixation study on text comprehension in primary school children

This study examined whether the formation of a situation model can be encouraged by a situation‐focused instruction in primary school children. To achieve this, the standard reading‐for‐comprehension instruction was adapted so that it would emphasise the importance of imagination in narrative text comprehension. The results showed that the situational instruction enhanced the situation model construction abilities in good comprehenders in such a way that it improved not only their memory for the situation model but also the ease with which they filled in the gaps in time and space that appeared in the narratives. In poor comprehenders, the situational instruction led to a redistribution of attentional resources allocated to textbase‐ and situation‐level processing. It was suggested that this caused them to go beyond encoding the explicit text and instead construct a situation model from it, and that they did so without enriching the model with general‐knowledge inferences as much as good comprehenders.     

A Comprehensive Theoretical Framework for Personal Information-Related Behaviors on the Internet

Although there is near consensus on the need for privacy, the reality is that people's attitude toward their personal information privacy is complex. For instance, even when people claim that they value their information privacy, they often trade their personal information for tangible or intangible benefits. In this article, the research on different ways in which people respond to risks to privacy is examined. They include information seeking to reduce uncertainty, the withholding of information, and the provision of fabricated information. The impact of trust and inducements on Internet users’ willingness to share personal information is also examined. Thereafter, important postulates from theories in communication, social psychology, and sociology are synthesized into a comprehensive theoretical framework for personal information-related behaviors in the online environment.     

Reading the least read? Indicators of users' intention to consult privacy statements on municipal websites

Though seldom read or consulted, privacy statements are often the only means for users to know how their personal data will be used by collecting organizations. While the length and the legalistic nature of most privacy statements are often blamed for people's reluctance to consult such documents, studies on the factors that influence users' intention to read privacy statements are still non-existent. For this survey, respondents from the Netherlands were presented with the situation of registering a child for a basic school through their municipalities' websites. The scenario was selected since it was assumed that it would be one that would require a significant amount of personal data from registrants, and not just the usual contact information. Results of the conducted online survey reveal that although not all users consult a privacy statement on a municipal website before they would disclose personal data, the availability and the ease of finding them on a municipal website strongly contribute to users' belief that a municipality can be trusted with their personal data whenever they are shared for a particular online transaction. This study also shows that users' perceptions of the risks involved in the online disclosure of their personal data influenced their intention to read online privacy statements on municipal websites. Older users were also more likely to consult privacy statements than their younger counterparts, while those with lower levels of education and internet experience expressed a higher tendency to read such online documents than those with higher levels of education and internet experience.     

Usable guidelines for usable websites? An analysis of five e-government heuristics

Many government organizations use web heuristics for the quality assurance of their websites. Heuristics may be used by web designers to guide the decisions about a website in development, or by web evaluators to optimize or assess the quality of an existing website. Despite their popularity, very little is known about the usefulness of heuristics for web designers and evaluators. In this study, five government heuristics are examined with special attention to their presumed use, content, validity, and presentation format. Our findings raise questions about the usability of heuristics for web design and web evaluation purposes. More research into the actual use and effects of web heuristics is needed.     

When the bureaucrat promises to safeguard your online privacy: Dissecting the contents of privacy statements on Dutch municipal websites

Various studies show that the display of a privacy statement on an organization's website can be a potent, but simple way of acquiring clients' and users' trust, which results in the completion of transactions with the organization through its website. Empirical studies that analyze the contents of privacy statements on commercial websites are profuse, while privacy statements posted on the websites of non-commercial organizations have been largely ignored by researchers. In this study, the contents of privacy statements on Dutch municipal websites are analyzed. Using the important provisions of the Wet Bescherming Persoonsgegevens (WBP) or the Dutch Personal Data Protection Act, the study also looked into the conformity of the contents of privacy statements with the existing law on privacy protection in the Netherlands. We also looked into the availability and findability of privacy statements on Dutch municipal websites. Three important findings resulted from this study: first, not all municipal websites bother to post privacy statements on their websites; second, most municipalities do not ensure that their online privacy statements are findable; and third, privacy statements on Dutch municipal websites emphasize diverging assurances and promises—with some privacy policies containing all the important provisions of the WBP, and others offering only general, and sometimes rather vague, guarantees.     

Focus: Design and Evaluation of a Software Tool for Collecting Reader Feedback

Reader feedback is generally considered to be valuable input for writers who want to optimize their documents, but a reader-focused evaluation is often time-consuming. For this reason, we have developed Focus, a software tool for collecting reader comments more efficiently. The design and rationale of the software are described in this article. In a small-scale evaluation study, the results we obtained using Focus were compared to the reader feedback collected under the plus-minus method. It appeared that the number of problems detected per participant did not differ, but there were differences in the types of problems found. Focus participants appeared to comment more from a reviewer's and less from a user's perspective. Although the two methods are not interchangeable, Focus can be said to be a promising evaluation tool, deserving further research.     

Becoming Part of the Story! Refueling the Interest in Visualization Strategies for Reading Comprehension

Visualizing the events described in a text is crucial for constructing a rich and coherent visuospatial mental representation (i.e., situation model) of the text. According to current reading comprehension theories, the construction of such a situation model likely involves all sensory modalities. However, at present these insights are hardly used to inform reading comprehension strategies for improving the understanding of text. To provide more insight into the different ways visualization can be used to encourage readers to build non-linguistic representations of text, this paper classifies the visualization strategies that have been studied and discussed in the literature along internal-external and unimodal-multimodal dimensions. Thereby, educators and other readers are presented with a contemporary collection of visualization strategies to improve reading comprehension that could inform practice and provide a basis for further research.     

Model method drawing acts as a double-edged sword for solving inconsistent word problems

Educational Studies in Mathematics - Drawing bar diagrams has been shown to improve performance on mathematical word problems wherein the relational keyword is consistent with the required...