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…

The purpose of this descriptive qualitative study is to better understand how teachers and district leaders respond when implementing a technology instructional support application. The study also explores the influences affecting that implementation process. Secondary mathematics teachers who had been presented with the option to implement a…

Performance assessments have become the norm for evaluating language learners' writing abilities in international examinations of English proficiency. Two aspects of these assessments are usually systematically varied: test takers respond to different prompts, and their responses are read by different raters. This raises the possibility of undue…

In response to the demands of the changing economy and the business community's need for better-educated, more highly skilled workers, the U.S. Department of Education, through the Office of Vocational and Adult Education (OVAE), developed the State Scholars Initiative (SSI), which encourages students to take a rigorous course of study in high…

In this technical report, we describe the development and piloting of a series of mathematics progress monitoring measures intended for use with students in grade 1. These measures, available as part of easyCBM [TM], an online progress monitoring assessment system, were developed in 2008 and administered to approximately 2800 students from schools…

The purpose of this study was to examine the instructional effectiveness of different levels of chunking (simple visual/text and complex visual/text), different forms of feedback (item-by-item feedback, end-of-test feedback and no feedback), and use of instructional gaming (game and no game) in complementing animated programmed instruction on a…

This technical report describes the development of reading comprehension assessments designed for use as progress monitoring measures appropriate for 2nd Grade students. The creation, piloting, and technical adequacy of the measures are presented. The following are appended: (1) Item Specifications for MC [Multiple Choice] Comprehension - Passage…

This technical report describes the development and piloting of reading comprehension measures developed for use by fifth-grade students as part of an online progress monitoring assessment system, http://easycbm.com. Each comprehension measure is comprised of an original work of narrative fiction approximately 1500 words in length followed by 20…