Acquiring research skills is considered to be a highly challenging aspect of developing expertise in the social sciences. Because instruction and mentoring in these skills are typically grounded in the self-report of researchers, difficulties in learning the material may be due to the content and accuracy of these explanations. Using a…

Forty toddlers, 1 1/2 to 3 1/2 years of age, and 8 adults, searched for stickers that were hidden underneath two discretely different classes of objects embedded in arrays containing several classes. Study results suggest that the children appear to have been attempting to determine which kinds of choices were the wrong ones. (Author/RWB)

This manual describes Version 4 of Soar, an architecture for problem solving and learning based on heuristic search and chunking. Version 4 is available as of January 1986 in Common Lisp, Franz-Lisp, Interlisp, and Zeta-Lisp. An introduction to the Soar system is presented, and information is provided about the following system aspects: (1) data…

Presents a description of PLEXUS, an expert system on gardening designed as a referral tool for public libraries by the University of London. Highlights include determining user characteristics, developing the problem statement, the use of semantic categories, and search strategies that modify the original problem statement using Boolean…

Examines processes by which general but weak search methods are transformed into powerful, domain-specific search strategies by classifying types of heuristics learning that can occur and components that contribute to such learning. A learning system--SAGE.2--and its structure, behavior in different domains, and future directions are explored. (36…

Presents results of five experiments on human information-seeking behavior in different online information-seeking environments which studied search strategies and assessed information value in realistic search environments. A conceptual model of how humans value information is presented. Empirical and modeling results are considered for…

This paper explores the fault-tree analysis approach to isolating failure modes within a system. Fault tree investigates potentially undesirable events and then looks for failures in sequence that would lead to their occurring. Relationships among these events are symbolized by AND or OR logic gates, AND used when single events must coexist to…

This study compared the efficiency (time) and accuracy of two representations of instructional algorithms--list versus flow chart--for the task of using indexes to search for document numbers in the U.S. Documents Monthly Catalog. Participants were 55 undergraduates and 5 adults at the Virginia Military Institute. Two sets (flow charts and lists)…