VTechWorks Repository :: Browsing by Author "Tatar, Deborah Gail"

Browsing by Author "Tatar, Deborah Gail"

Now showing 1 - 20 of 42

Architecture-Centric Project Estimation
Henry, Troy Steven (Virginia Tech, 2007-05-14)
In recent years studies have been conducted which suggest that taking an architecture first approach to managing large software projects can reduce a significant amount of the uncertainty present in project estimates. As the project progresses, more concrete information is known about the planned system and less risk is present. However, the rate at which risk is alleviated varies across the life-cycle. Research suggests that there exists a significant drop off in risk when the architecture is developed. Software risk assessment techniques have been developed which attempt to quantify the amount of risk that varying uncertainties convey to a software project. These techniques can be applied to architecture specific issues to show that in many cases, conducting an architecture centric approach to development will remove more risk than the cost of developing the architecture. By committing to developing the architecture prior to the formal estimation process, specific risks can be more tightly bounded, or even removed from the project. The premise presented here is that through the process of architecture-centric management, it is possible to remove substantial risk from the project. This decrease in risk exceeds that at other phases of the life-cycle, especially in comparison of the effort involved. Notably, at architecture, a sufficient amount knowledge is gained by which effort estimations may be tightly bounded, yet the project is early enough in the life-cycle for proper planning and scheduling. Thus, risk is mitigated through the increase in knowledge and the ability to maintain options at an early point. Further, architecture development and evaluation has been shown to incorporate quality factors normally insufficiently considered in the system design. The approach taken here is to consider specific knowledge gained through the architecting process and how this is reflected in parametric effort estimation models. This added knowledge is directly reflected in risk reduction. Drawing on experience of architecture researchers as well as project managers employing this approach, this thesis considers what benefits to the software development process are gained by taking this approach. Noting a strong reluctance of owners to incorporate solid software engineering practices, the thesis concludes with an outline for an experiment which goes about proving the reduction in risk at architecture exceeds the cost of that development.
Cheating in Multiplayer Video Games
Hardy, Robert Stafford (Virginia Tech, 2009-04-15)
Cheating in video games has been prevalent ever since the days of Pong. Games have evolved much since then and the ways in which people play together have changed as well. Older systems required people to play together in the same room, but with the advent of the internet, gaming consoles allow us to play games together with people located all over the globe. Cheating has evolved as well, since gamers no longer have the luxury of monitoring the person sitting next to them; anti-cheating mechanisms are built into most online systems and suspicious behavior is monitored by gaming companies. Most of the current research has surrounded ways in which players cheat and their reasoning for doing so. This is only half of the equation however, what happens after a gamer is caught cheating? What are the repercussions for being caught cheating and how does being caught influence future decisions to cheat? By putting gamers in a situation where they are caught cheating, three different responses were revealed: those who are determined to cheat no matter what, those who scale back their cheating in the hopes of remaining undetected, and those who stopped cheating altogether.
Civil War Twin: Exploring Ethical Challenges in Designing an Educational Face Recognition Application
Kusuma, Manisha (Virginia Tech, 2022-01-06)
Facial recognition systems pose numerous ethical challenges around privacy, racial and gender bias, and accuracy, yet little guidance is available for designers and developers. We explore solutions to these challenges in a four-phase design process to create Civil War Twin (CWT), an educational web-based application where users can discover their lookalikes from the American Civil War era (1861-65) while learning more about facial recognition and history. Through this design process, we synthesize industry guidelines, consult with scholars of history, gender, and race, evaluate CWT in feedback sessions with diverse prospective users, and conduct a usability study with crowd workers. We iteratively formulate design goals to incorporate transparency, inclusivity, speculative design, and empathy into our application. We found that users' perceived learning about the strengths and limitations of facial recognition and Civil War history improved after using CWT, and that our design successfully met users' ethical standards. We also discuss how our ethical design process can be applied to future facial recognition applications.
Classroom resources and impact on learning
Kurdziolek, Margaret Angela (Virginia Tech, 2011-08-05)
In the past, educators and policy makers believed that by providing more resources they could directly improve student-learning outcomes. To their frustration, this turns out not to be entirely true. Resources may be necessary but they are not sufficient. Resources themselves are not self-enacting, that is, they do not make change inevitable. Differences in their effects depend on differences in their use. This is also true in the case of educational technologies. As developers of these technologies we need to understand how resources fit within the classroom environment as enacted and how they can be effectively used to increase student learning. I report on four case studies conducted within the context of the Scaling-Up SimCalc study. In the study, "treatment" teachers were given a set of new resources to use: a combination of curriculum, educational software, and teacher professional development. "Delayed treatment" (control) teachers were asked to use their usual curriculum. Year-one study results demonstrated by randomized controlled testing the successful use of technology in class settings; however, there was little information on how the students and teachers actually interacted with the resources. Case study classrooms were selected to examine the effects of variation of computational resource arrangements: one utilized a computer lab, two used mobile laptop carts, and one used a laptop connected to a projector. The first round coding and analysis shows that the observed classrooms varied not only in their classroom set-ups but also in how teachers and students interacted with the software, the workbooks, and with one another. The variety of resource interaction points to the robustness of the SimCalc project: students and teachers can interact with the SimCalc resources in a variety of ways and still achieve student-learning gains. However, through subsequent review and analysis of the observation data five themes emerged. These themes suggest commonalities in classrooms practices surrounding the use of resources. Two new theoretical constructs, "socio-physical resource richness" and "resource use withitness" help describe (1) physical and social arrangements of resources and (2) how teachers and students manage resource use.
CoListen
Stewart, Michael Clark (Virginia Tech, 2018-09-19)
Humans need to feel connected to one another. With each new technology we create and re-create ways to connect with others we care about. Thanks to the ubiquity of powerful mobile technology in certain parts of the world, we have nearly immediate access to those remote others. Despite these advances our shared experiences are diminishing, and the ways we most often connect with our remote framily members seem to be superficial and at the expense of more meaningful interaction with collocated family members. People are not likely to give up the convenience and entertainment afforded by their mobile technology, but might those same technologies be capable of supporting interactions that help the users be the selves they wish they were, rather than the consumers their technologies were designed to support? To investigate the space of technological support for people's feelings of togetherness I conducted three studies. The first study was a diary study over 14 days where I asked about the current practices of middle schoolers for communicating with friends out side of school and for listening to music. In the second study, I conducted a design charrette where participants designed a technology to support co-listening, and then tried my first prototype. CoListen is a streaming music player that supports a listener in listening to the same music at the same time as a friend or family member. CoListen is designed with the explicit intent of requiring as little of the listener's attention as possible. In the third study, I deployed Colisten v1.0 in the wild and conducted a 14-day diary study asking participants about their experiences. I found that many of the participants from my target population listen to music and communicate with their friends, and that phatic communication (as opposed to goal-oriented communication) was prominent. I also found participants to be interested in the idea of technology to support co-listening and intrigued by how few little the barrier to co-listening can be, and how little attention is required. In study 3 I found that people enjoyed the experience of remote co-listening and did listen to music as a background activity. Many participatns reported feeling more together with their framily members with whom they co-listened.
Communication of Emotion in Mediated and Technology-Mediated Contexts: Face-to-Face, Telephone, and Instant Messaging
Burge, Jamika D. (Virginia Tech, 2007-04-23)
This dissertation work considers communication between people. I look at coordinating dyads (couples in relationships) and people in working relationships to develop an understanding of how people engage in high-stakes, or emotional communication via various communicative media. The approach for this research is to observe and measure people's behavior during interaction and subsequent reporting of that behavior and associated internal experiences. Qualitative and quantitative methods are employed. Quantitative data are analyzed using a range of statistical analyses, including correlations matrices, ANOVAs, and multivariate statistics. Two controlled laboratory experiments were conducted for this research. These experiments involved couples in relationships. Couples were brought into the lab and argued with each other across one of three technological media: face-to-face, telephone, and instant messaging (IM). In one set of couples' experiments, the couples argued for twenty minutes; in the subsequent couples' experiment, couples were encouraged to take as much time as they needed for their arguments. One of the main results from the first experiment is that couples did, indeed, argue when brought into a laboratory setting. One of the important findings for the second experiment is that time did not affect couples' tendency to reach closure during their arguments. This research is a contribution in that it examines how people engage in highly emotional communication using various technological media. In a society with ever-increasing communication needs that require technology, it becomes necessary to study its communicative affordances. Understanding the context of highly emotional interactions between members of couples gives insight into how technology meets (or fails to meet) these communication needs.
Complexity of Engineering Identity: A Study of Freshmen Engineering Students
Trammell, Melanie Kaye (Virginia Tech, 2019-07-15)
The General Engineering Program exists at Virginia Tech to provide curriculums that engage, challenge and support entry-level engineers. One important part of this initiative is helping students identify with a specific engineering branch, and overtime develop an identity within it. Yet, there exists little research on what entry-level engineers believe it means to be an engineer, especially during these stages of early formation and continual shifting. In order to generate insight on this topic we developed a contextual inquiry method to help inquire into engineering identity. Two participants were placed in an online chatroom and allowed to talk for ten minutes, with one trying to answer the question 'Am I talking to an engineer or not?' and asked to give their reasoning. Comparisons allow entry-level engineering students to articulate their beliefs on what characteristics, behaviors and personalities make up their cohort -- thus exposing their ideas about identity. Moreover, this methodology also provides opportunities for participants to critique their own bias and further develop and expose their opinions on identity. Additionally, our findings showcase the complexity around student's perceptions of engineers. For example, participants' responses pointed to: many sources that inform identity, the difficulty of identifying what is uniquely engineering, how identity is impacted by the ideal image of an engineer, that identity is a spectrum, and that identity varies with respect to associations and time. As a result, through our inquiry and representation of results we demonstrate the validity of our methodology as a HCI research tool along with the power of narrative forms of representation.
Contextualizing Remote Touch for Affect Conveyance
Wang, Rongrong (Virginia Tech, 2012-09-27)
Touch is an expressive and powerful modality in affect conveyance. A simple touch like a hug can elicit strong feelings of affection both in the touch initiator and recipient. Therefore delivering touch over a distance to a long-distance family member or significant other has been an appealing concept for both researchers and designers. However compared to the development of audio, video channels which allow the transmission of voice, facial expression and gesture, digitally mediated touch (Remote Touch) has not received much attention. We believe that this is partially due to the lack of understanding of the capabilities and communication possibilities that remote touch brings. This dissertation presents a review of relevant psychological and sociological literature of touch and proposes a model of immediacy of the touch channel for affect conveyance. We advance three hypotheses regarding the possibility of remote touch in immediate affect conveyance: presence, fidelity and context. We posit that remote touch with relatively low touch fidelity can convey meaningful immediate affect when it is accompanied by a contextualizing channel. To test the hypothesis, two sets of remote touch devices are designed and prototyped which allow users to send/receive a squeeze on the upper arm to/from others effectively. Three in-lab user studies are conducted to investigate the role of remote touch in affect conveyance. These studies showed clearly that remote touch, when contextualized, can influence the affective component in communication. Our results demonstrated that remote touch can afford a rich spectrum of meanings and affects. Three major categories of the usage are identified as positive affect touch which serves to convey affects such as affection, sympathy and sharing, comfort etc., playful touch which serves to lighten the conversations, and conversational touch which serves to regulate the dynamics in the discourse. Our interview results also provide insights of how people use this new channel in their communication.
Critisearch for Scholarly Search
Joshi, Sarang G. (Virginia Tech, 2018-11-30)
Online search has empowered users with access to vast amounts of information. However, current online interfaces do not permit users to manipulate the hits on a search engine result page (SERP). This leads to the user adapting his/her own search style to suit the search engine instead of being the other way round. We present Critisearch, an online search interface that allows users to manipulate hits by upvoting, downvoting and sorting them such that they can be arranged in a user-defined order. Critisearch was originally developed for middle school children. However, we found an interesting dearth of studies on how graduate students conduct searches. In order to evaluate how the manipulation of hits can benefit users, we conducted a longitudinal study with 10 graduate students who used Critisearch and/or other search engine/s of their choice for conducting the scholarly search over a three week period. Results indicate that using Critisearch for hit manipulation enabled metacognitive scaffolding (plan, filter, sort information) on the search engine interface especially in exploratory search contexts. Critisearch seems to facilitate a conversation with the interface by enabling marking of hits. In addition, Critisearch also appears to promote reflection with the upvote/downvote capabilities for marking of hits available to the user. The hit manipulation and metacognitive scaffolding on the Critisearch interface encourages users to conduct their search tasks in a more breadth-first fashion as opposed to the commonly used depth-first search strategy. Using qualitative analysis, we discovered three distinct types of search tasks that users perform in a scholarly context namely, specific exploration, needle-in-a-haystack and general exploration. This analysis provides a starting point for a better understanding information needs of users in a scholarly context and a classification of search tasks thus, adding to the existing body of literature on nature of online search tasks.
Design and Evaluation of Techniques to Utilize Implicit Rating Data in Complex Information Systems.
Kim, Seonho; Fox, Edward A.; Fan, Weiguo; North, Christopher L.; Tatar, Deborah Gail; Torres, Ricardo da Silva (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 2007-05-01)
Research in personalization, including recommender systems, focuses on applications such as in online shopping malls and simple information systems. These systems consider user profile and item information obtained from data explicitly entered by users - where it is possible to classify items involved and to make personalization based on a direct mapping from user or user group to item or item group. However, in complex, dynamic, and professional information systems, such as Digital Libraries, additional capabilities are needed to achieve personalization to support their distinctive features: large numbers of digital objects, dynamic updates, sparse rating data, biased rating data on specific items, and challenges in getting explicit rating data from users. In this report, we present techniques for collecting, storing, processing, and utilizing implicit rating data of Digital Libraries for analysis and decision support. We present our pilot study to find virtual user groups using implicit rating data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of implicit rating data for characterizing users and finding virtual user communities, through statistical hypothesis testing. Further, we describe a visual data mining tool named VUDM (Visual User model Data Mining tool) that utilizes implicit rating data. We provide the results of formative evaluation of VUDM and discuss the problems raised and plans for further studies.
Designing Socio-Technical Systems to Illuminate Possibilities for a Vulnerable Population
Gautam, Aakash (Virginia Tech, 2021-08-12)
How might computer scientists work with communities in facilitating meaningful social change? In this project, we make a case for an approach that builds upon what the individuals and community already have---their assets---rather than emphasizing "user's needs" as typically postulated by human-centered design. We present details of our four-year-long assets-based engagement with an anti-trafficking organization in Nepal and the sex trafficking survivors supported by the organization. We explored the potential role that socio-technical systems and technology designers can play in assisting the survivors to build on their existing assets towards their vision of "dignified reintegration". The research involves three fieldwork and a remote study, each one leveraging carefully tailored socio-technical systems to investigate a design proposition. We present an operationalizable definition of assets and a framework of action to leverage assets in realizing change at an individual and institutional level. We describe the conditions that influenced the possibilities for our interventions and the factors that guided the design of the socio-technical systems. We further highlight how we adapted our methods to the local resources and practices in order to foster a space that promoted comfort and control to the study participants. The detailed account of our approach aims to provide a justification for undertaking slow, incremental steps with the community.
Educational Technology and Teacher Perceptions: How does the technology fare in the wild?
Kurdziolek, Margaret Angela (Virginia Tech, 2007-05-15)
MathWorlds is a piece of educational software that allows students to explore a variety of topics related to the mathematics of change and proportionality, utilizing dynamic graphs and animated "worlds". SimCalc is the package of MathWorlds software plus curriculum and teacher professional development, and has a history of significant success in single classroom studies. According to Simonsen and Kensing (1998), "users will not change the way they work to adapt to a computer system if the benefits are not significant and obvious." While researchers know SimCalc has a significant impact on student outcomes, is this obvious to the teachers? One powerful source of information about this question is the corpus of extensive phone interviews that my colleagues and I conducted with teachers after they completed the SimCalc curriculum. Many of our teachers recognized SimCalc as something that could be beneficial for their students. Besides raising test scores, teachers using SimCalc introduce more complex mathematical ideas to their students, which have ordinarily been considered outside a normal 7th grade math lesson. This was reflected in the phone interviews when treatment teachers mentioned more complex mathematical ideas than the control teachers. However, some treatment teachers struggled with using SimCalc because it was so different from their current teaching methods. In this case, SimCalc was not compatible with their current teaching methods. Also, for some teachers, using technology such as MathWorlds is a complex process with many hurdles to overcome. Future research must investigate ways to bridge the gaps in teaching methods and encourage more support for teachers using technology. By doing this researchers can make SimCalc more compatible for teachers with different teaching methods and reduce the number of obstacles teachers face when using technology in the classroom. With continued effort, research and support, we can look forward to the diffusion of more educational innovations such as SimCalc.
Effects of Feedback Video in Mediated Communication
Dewal, Shiwani Sita (Virginia Tech, 2016-10-04)
Video-conferencing has become a widely-used form of mediated personal communication. While other form of real-time communication such as face-to-face conversations or telephonic conversation, do not afford any form of feedback about self-presentation to individuals; video conferencing has the ability to provide a continuous feedback video loop. Previous work in this area has shown that this form of feedback can cause issues related to vanity and distraction. However, effects on sensitive aspects of the human psyche, such as self-consciousness and self-esteem, have not been studied. In this project we investigated such possible effects, specifically related to self-consciousness and self-esteem, through laboratory-based user study. The results of this exploratory study form lay the grounds for further research, which can be used to inform theory and design for video-conferencing systems.
The Effects of Handheld Network Service "Look" on the Acquisition of Common Ground
Kim, Kibum (Virginia Tech, 2007-01-12)
Constructing common ground and the associated convergent conceptual change is critical to cooperative work and learning. Convergent conceptual change is achieved as participants in a conversation update common ground through presentations, repairs, and acceptances of utterances. People employ available techniques that utilize the least collaborative effort for current purposes. Although sharing physical co-presence of interlocutors' facial expressions doesn't make grounding more efficient even in more open-ended and less task-focused dialogues, visual co-presence of the addressee's workspace is essential to work-related tasks, such as information transmission and collaborative problem-solving. However, handheld-mediated collaborative activity makes sharing the workspace challenging, especially when we consider that handhelds possess small screens and permit activities of a distributed nature. In a handheld-mediated classroom, a teacher must be able to check students' work for various reasons (e.g., grading, checking whether they are following directions correctly or paying attention) and at various phases of the activity. Gazing into the small screen of a handheld over someone's shoulder is a tricky task at best. The teacher may misread the information on the screen and thus provide incorrect feedback. Another challenge involves the difficulty inherent in latecomers joining the collaborative activity when each student is involved with his or her individual and small screen. This exclusion from joining on-going activity can reduce the chance of student's vicarious and serendipitous learning. Although such events may occur naturally in the learning environment, they become important concerns when one attempts to focus collaborative activities with handheld devices. I therefore created a new handheld network service called "Look," which is designed to facilitate the acquisition of common ground and allow a latecomer to do meaningful monitoring of ongoing conversation about the workspace. I tested empirically the value of this shared physical/virtual context in the task of creating common ground by examining task performance and conversation quality.
The Effects of Teacher-Student Racial and Ethnic Congruence on Student Math Learning
Stroter, Antionette Denise (Virginia Tech, 2008-05-19)
The Supreme Court of the United States has recently determined that assigning students to schools and classrooms based on racial identity is unconstitutional. However, it also left the door open for further and different rulings. If researchers are able to show that lack of consideration of race has deleterious effects on federally mandated programs and initiatives, the ruling may be modified or opened up to specific circumstances. Among its many consequences, this ruling brings a focus onto the question of student-teacher matching in classrooms. Over the years, there has been a great deal of discussion in the literature about matching teacher and student by race, ethnicity, gender, and language. Some people claim that matching is crucial for student success while others dispute this claim. The current study examines the question of racial and ethnic matching empirically in the context of a large-scale randomized controlled study of an innovation for middle school mathematics learners. It extends the literature by (1) focusing on the relationship between student-teacher match and a specific, heavily documented situation with targeted learning goals, (2) adding information about Hispanic students to the discussion, and (3) helping evaluate factors that may be important in determining the validity of large-scale experiments. Alone and in conjunction with other similar empirical evidence, it will also have a significant effect on federal and state educational policy. The sample consists of the 92 teachers and 1576 7th grade students on 76 school campuses throughout 8 Texas regions who participated in the Scaling-Up SimCalc project. Teachers and students either used SimCalc Mathworlds™ curriculum and technology or a control for a two-week replacement unit. The crux of the current analysis was a match between aggregated and individual teacher and student characteristics and an inquiry into how these matches influence student math performance in the classroom within and between our experimental and control group. Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) analysis was used to investigate the differences in student mathematics performance, modeled as students nested in classrooms nested in schools.
Enabling the Blind to See Gestures
Oliveira, Francisco Carlos De Mattos Brito (Virginia Tech, 2010-08-02)
Mathematics instruction and discourse typically involve two modes of communication: speech and graphical presentation. For the communication to remain situated, dynamic synchrony must be maintained between the speech and dynamic focus in the graphics. Sighted students use vision for two purposes: access to graphical material and awareness of embodied behavior. This embodiment awareness keeps communication situated with visual material and speech. Our goal is to assist students who are blind or visually impaired (SBVI) in the access to such instruction/communication. We employ the typical approach of sensory replacement for the missing visual sense. Haptic fingertip reading can replace visual material. We want to make the SBVI aware of the deictic gestures performed by the teacher over the graphic in conjunction with speech. We employ a haptic glove interface to facilitate this embodiment awareness. In this research, we address issues from the conception through the design, implementation, evaluation to the effective and successful use of our Haptic Deictic System (HDS) in inclusive classrooms.
Exploring and Promoting Family Connections at a Distance Through FamilySong
Tibau Benitez, Javier Alejandro (Virginia Tech, 2020-02-03)
This work explores the design of domestic Media Spaces by introducing and studying FamilySong (FS), a system that allows the synchronous playback of music between two remote households. FS does not share live audio or video, yet our studies show that FS provides a context for increasing serendipity as families integrate it into their ecology of communication practices and devices. Through three design iterations involving Autobiographical Design, Research-Through-Design, and qualitative research methods, we study six Latin American migrant families (with parents and children in the United States, and grandparents in Ecuador and Mexico), and one from the U.S., interact with FamilySong. We have found that, individually, family members have differing motivations and reactions to using the system. However, participants felt that the shared experience was meaningful to them and that they could use FamilySong to communicate important intentions, values and emotions as well as musical experiences. In the most recent iteration, the main interactions empowered very young children's participation in music selection. This has been met with joy and excitement by all but also with occasional behavioral dilemmas.This work explores and expands the design space of Media Spaces to include a set of artifacts that forgo its central definition yet provide similar emergent qualities including enhanced mutual awareness, connection, and communication. FS design explores the intersection of family practices and values---of togetherness and longing, parent-child dynamics at all ages, kinship, identity and culture---, and divided versus focused attention in the home. It also enriches our understanding of designing technology for meaningful interaction that supports loved ones and their values.
Framing Coordination in Collocated Computer-Mediated Communication
Alaloula, Nouf M. (Virginia Tech, 2010-05-03)
This thesis explores the framing of coordinative experience in collocated computer-mediated communication. It highlights the importance of low- level coordinative properties through multifaceted examination of the transcript of the first minute of a constructed coordinative situation. In efforts to truly understand the culture we are creating and invoking by adding computers to people's activities in groups, and life in general. A lab study was conducted using a computer program that allows one or more users to solve a Sudoku puzzle together, each on their own separate computer. This allowed for an investigation of what happens when people and technology are located in the same place. How do people construct their situation, in terms of who goes next, what do they do and what constitutes the behavior framing.
From Intuition to Evidence: A Data-Driven Approach to Transforming CS Education
Allevato, Anthony James (Virginia Tech, 2012-07-16)
Educators in many disciplines are too often forced to rely on intuition about how students learn and the effectiveness of teaching to guide changes and improvements to their curricula. In computer science, systems that perform automated collection and assessment of programming assignments are seeing increased adoption, and these systems generate a great deal of meaningful intermediate data and statistics during the grading process. Continuous collection of these data and long-term retention of collected data present educators with a new resource to assess both learning (how well students understand a topic or how they behave on assignments) and teaching (how effective a response, intervention, or assessment instrument was in evaluating knowledge or changing behavior), by basing their decisions on evidence rather than intuition. It is only possible to achieve these goals, however, if such data are easily accessible. I present an infrastructure that has been added to one such automated grading system, Web-CAT, in order to facilitate routine data collection and access while requiring very little added effort by instructors. Using this infrastructure, I present three case studies that serve as representative examples of educational questions that can be explored thoroughly using pre-existing data from required student work. The first case study examines student time management habits and finds that students perform better when they start earlier but that offering extra credit for finishing earlier did not encourage them to do so. The second case study evaluates a tool used to improve student understanding of manual memory management and finds that students made fewer errors when using the tool. The third case study evaluates the reference tests used to grade student code on a selected assignment and confirms that the tests are a suitable instrument for assessing student ability. In each case study, I use a data-driven, evidence-based approach spanning multiple semesters and students, allowing me to answer each question in greater detail than was possible using previous methods and giving me significantly increased confidence in my conclusions.
Getting Lost in Email: How and Why Users Spend More Time in Email than Intended
Hanrahan, Benjamin Vincent (Virginia Tech, 2015-01-21)
Email has become deeply embedded in many users' daily lives. To investigate how email features in users lives, particularly how users attend to email and get lost within it, I ran five studies that probed how users determined relevancy of messages, logged interactions with email, gathered diary entries related to individual sessions, and investigated the gratifications sought from email use. For the first study, I performed an exploratory experiment in the laboratory to determine how participants assessed the importance of individual emails (N=10). The next investigation I undertook involved three different studies, which I detail individually: a survey on email usage (N=54); a two-week study of email usage (N=20); and finally, the application of Attentional Network Test (N=9). My final study was to validate my findings around the reasons for attending to email, this was done through deploying a survey that followed the Uses and Gratification Theory tradition (N=52) In my studies I found that the majority of attentional effort is around reading email and participating in conversations, as opposed to email management. I also found that participants attended to email primarily based on notifications, instead of the number of unread messages in their inbox. I present my results through answering several research questions, and leverage Conversation Analysis (CA), particularly conversation openings, to explicate several problematic aspects around email use. My findings point to inefficiencies in email as a communication medium, mainly, around how summons are (or are not) issued. This results in an increased burden on email users to maintain engagement and determine (or construct) the appropriate moment for interruption. My findings have several implications: email triage does not seem to be problematic for the participants in my studies, somewhat in contrast to previous research; much of the problem around email, particularly emph{getting lost in email} is in managing the tension between promptly responding to messages while limiting engagement with email; due to the social nature of the problems with email, modifications to the email client are limited in their potential effectiveness to prevent getting lost and reduce email related anxiety.

Browsing by Author "Tatar, Deborah Gail"

Results Per Page

Sort Options