This article focuses on assessing the level of difficulty of search questions for Web searching, looking at variations in judgments by type of questions and the reasons underlying these judgments. Analyzes the decisions and reasoning of 54 experiences Web searchers on 16 search questions of four types, and includes the questionnaire used.…

Presents the research findings of an empirical study conducted in Finnish governmental organizations on task complexity and information-seeking activities in real-life work tasks. Focuses on the relationship between information types and source use, and the effects of task complexity on that relationship. (Author/LRW)

This study compared judgments of idiom familiarity and transparency by 50 11-year-old children and 50 16-year-old adolescents. Although the children had less familiarity and greater difficulty comprehending the idioms than did adolescents, their transparency judgments were similar. For both groups the easiest idioms were also judged as the most…

A study of 61 adults with at least a bachelor's degree and 44 high school dropouts showed that the latter perceived products with simply worded warnings as safer than those with difficult vocabulary. College-educated adults had more negative attitudes toward warnings with difficult words despite equal comprehension of both. (Contains 39…

Derrida's archive, broadly speaking, is brilliantly mad, for he digs exegetically into the most difficult textual material and combines the most unlikely texts--from Socrates to Freud, from postcards to encyclopedias, from madness(es) to the archive, from primal scenes to death. In this paper, the author would like to do a brief study of the…

An eye-movement monitoring experiment was carried out to examine the effects of the difficulty of the problem (simple versus complex problems) and the type of figure (figure 1 or figure 4) on the time course of processing categorical syllogisms. The results showed that the course of influence for these two factors is different. We found early…

To investigate students' self-monitoring practice and effects of educational level and task importance on self-monitoring, 510 students, varying in educational level from elementary through graduate school, reported the self-monitoring strategies they employed in three learning situations with different levels of task importance. The study…

Comments on analysis of attention tasks in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) provided by Wilding (2005)points out that whereas many regulatory functions, including alertness or arousal, appear to be impaired in ADHD, demonstrating basic attention deficits in selection or orienting functions in the disorder has proven difficult. Yet…

Increased numbers of elementary and secondary students with learning and other disabilities are participating in inclusive science classrooms. Unfortunately, many of these students struggle to achieve at a level commensurate with their peers. As a result, few students with disabilities pursue advanced scientific coursework or enter science,…

Conventional testing systems usually give students a score as their test result, but do not show them how to improve their learning performance. Researchers have indicated that students would benefit more if individual learning guidance could be provided. However, most of the existing learning diagnosis models ignore the fact that one concept…

No published studies have sufficiently focused on essay topic writability from the perspective of college writers of the new millennium including native English speakers and ESL speakers. In this study, 500 college writers in Metro Toronto in Canada were interviewed to uncover if they found some essay topics easier than other topics. The results…

Advances in technology have caused a major shift in how students spend their time and challenged curriculum development to maintain interest and focus in the classroom. Implications are most profound in issues related to literacy due to a lack of experience and interest in reading. This article explores this issue and how it relates to teaching…

Evaluation is an unavoidable feature in any teaching or learning scenario. The evaluation strategy of students differs widely throughout the world. Further, most of the institutes do not use any objective technique to assess the teaching performance of a teacher. The present paper defines performance metrics both for student and teacher evaluation…

This study extends ongoing work to identify difficult concepts in thermal and transport science and measure students' understanding of those concepts via a concept inventory. Two research questions provided the focal point: "What important concepts in electric circuits and engineering mechanics do students find difficult to learn?" and…

This paper investigates how monitoring the time spent on a question in a test of basic mathematics skills can provide insights into learning processes, the quality of test takers' knowledge, and cognitive demands and performance of test items that otherwise would remain undiscovered if the usual test outcome of accuracy only format…