Effect of screen presentation on text reading and revising. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies

Two studies using the methods of experimental psychology assessed the effects of two types of text presentation (page-by-page vs. scrolling) on participants' performance while reading and revising texts. Greater facilitative effects of the page-by-page presentation were observed in both tasks. The participants' reading task performance indicated that they built a better mental representation of the text as a whole and were better at locating relevant information and remembering the main ideas. Their revising task performance indicated a larger number of global corrections (which are the most difficult to make)

Reading in the Age of Continuous Partial Attention: Retail-Inspired Ideas for Academic Libraries

Reading is an essential skill that improves with practice, not just when we are learn-ing to read but as adults. College students may be out of the habit of reading except for required texts. Deep reading skills may be eroded by habits of interrupted and par-tial attention. This article explores ways to promote reading among college students through the implementation of best prac-tices from retail and marketing

Analyzing collaborative learning processes automatically

In this article we describe the emerging area of text classification research focused on the problem of collaborative learning process analysis both from a broad perspective and more specifically in terms of a publicly available tool set called TagHelper tools. Analyzing the variety of pedagogically valuable facets of learners’ interactions is a time consuming and effortful process. Improving automated analyses of such highly valued processes of collaborative learning by adapting and applying recent text classification technologies would make it a less arduous task to obtain insights from corpus data. This endeavor also holds the potential for enabling substantially improved on-line instruction both by providing teachers and facilitators with reports about the groups they are moderating and by triggering context sensitive collaborative learning support on an as-needed basis. In this article, we report on an interdisciplinary research project, which has been investigating the effectiveness of applying text classification technology to a large CSCL corpus that has been analyzed by human coders using a theory-based multidimensional coding scheme. We report promising results and include an in-depth discussion of important issues such as reliability, validity, and efficiency that should be considered when deciding on the appropriateness of adopting a new technology such as TagHelper tools. One major technical contribution of this work is a demonstration that an important piece of the work towards making text classification technology effective for this purpose is designing and building linguistic pattern detectors, otherwise known as features, that can be extracted reliably from texts and that have high predictive power for the categories of discourse actions that the CSCL community is interested in

A framework for the design of usable electronic text

This thesis examines the human issues underlying the design and usability of electronic text systems. In so doing it develops a framework for the conceptualisation of these issues that aims to guide designers of electronic texts in their attempts to produce usable systems. The thesis commences with a review of the traditional human factors literature on electronic text according to three basic themes: its concern with perceptual, manipulatory and structural issues. From this examination it is concluded that shortcomings in translating this work into design result from the adoption of overly narrow uni-disciplinary views of reading taken from cognitive psychology and information science which are inappropriate to serve the needs of electronic text designers. In an attempt to provide a more relevant description of the reading process a series of studies examining readers and their views as well as uses of texts is reported. In the first, a repertory grid based investigation revealed that all texts can be described in reader-relvant terms according to three criteria: why a text is read, what a text contains and how it is read. These criteria then form the basis of two investigations of reader-text interaction using academic journals and user manuals. The results of these studies highlighted the need to consider readers' models of a document's structure in discussing text usability. Subsequent experimental work on readers' models of academic articles demonstrated not only that such models are important aspects of reader-text interaction but that data of this form could usefully be employed in the design of an electronic text system. The proposed framework provides a broad, qualitative model of the important issues for designers to consider when developing a product It consists of four interactive elements that focus attention on aspects of reading that have been identified as central to usability. Simple tests of the utility and validity of the framework are reported and it is shown that the framework both supports reasoned analysis and subsequent prediction of reader behaviour as well as providing a parsimonious account of their verbal utterances while reading. The thesis concludes with an analysis of the likely uses of such a framework and the potential for electronic text systems in an increasingly information-hungry world

VRDoc: Gaze-based Interactions for VR Reading Experience

Virtual reality (VR) offers the promise of an infinite office and remote collaboration, however, existing interactions in VR do not strongly support one of the most essential tasks for most knowledge workers, reading. This paper presents VRDoc, a set of gaze-based interaction methods designed to improve the reading experience in VR. We introduce three key components: Gaze Select-and-Snap for document selection, Gaze MagGlass for enhanced text legibility, and Gaze Scroll for ease of document traversal. We implemented each of these tools using a commodity VR headset with eye-tracking. In a series of user studies with 13 participants, we show that VRDoc makes VR reading both more efficient (p < 0.01 ) and less demanding (p < 0.01), and when given a choice, users preferred to use our tools over the current VR reading methods.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, ISMAR 202

The Use of Multiple Slate Devices to Support Active Reading Activities

Reading activities in the classroom and workplace occur predominantly on paper. Since existing electronic devices do not support these reading activities as well as paper, users have difficulty taking full advantage of the affordances of electronic documents. This dissertation makes three main contributions toward supporting active reading electronically. The first contribution is a comprehensive set of active reading requirements, drawn from three decades of research into reading processes. These requirements explain why existing devices are inadequate for supporting active reading activities. The second contribution is a multi-slate reading system that more completely supports the active reading requirements above. Researchers believe the suitability of paper for active reading is largely due to the fact it distributes content across different sheets of paper, which are capable of displaying information as well as capturing input. The multi-slate approach draws inspiration from the independent reading and writing surfaces that paper provides, to blend the beneficial features of e-book readers, tablets, PCs, and tabletop computers. The development of the multi-slate system began with the Dual-Display E-book, which used two screens to provide richer navigation capabilities than a single-screen device. Following the success of the Dual-Display E-book, the United Slates, a general-purpose reading system consisting of an extensible number of slates, was created. The United Slates consisted of custom slate hardware, specialized interactions that enabled the slates to be used cooperatively, and a cloud-based infrastructure that robustly integrated the slates with users' existing computing devices and workflow. The third contribution is a series of evaluations that characterized reading with multiple slates. A laboratory study with 12 participants compared the relative merits of paper and electronic reading surfaces. One month long in-situ deployments of the United Slates with graduate students in the humanities found the multi-slate configuration to be highly effective for reading. The United Slates system delivered desirable paper-like qualities that included enhanced reading engagement, ease of navigation, and peace-of-mind while also providing superior electronic functionality. The positive feedback suggests that the multi-slate configuration is a desirable method for supporting active reading activities

The Lawyer as Legal Scholar

I review Eugene Volokh's recent book, Academic Legal Writing. The book is nominally directed to law students and those who teach them (and for those audiences, it is outstanding), but it also contains a number of valuable lessons for published scholars. The book is more than a writing manual, however. I argue that Professor Volokh suggests implicitly that scholarship is underappreciated as a dimension of the legal profession. A well-trained lawyer, in other words, should have experience as a scholar. The argument sheds new light on ongoing discussions about the character of law schools

Enhancing Textbooks with Visuals from the Web for Improved Learning

Textbooks are the primary vehicle for delivering quality education to students. It has been shown that explanatory or illustrative visuals play a key role in the retention, comprehension and the general transfer of knowledge. However, many textbooks, especially in the developing world, are low quality and lack interesting visuals to support student learning. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of vision-language models to automatically enhance textbooks with images from the web. Specifically, we collect a dataset of e-textbooks from one of the largest free online publishers in the world. We rigorously analyse the dataset, and use the resulting analysis to motivate a task that involves retrieving and appropriately assigning web images to textbooks, which we frame as a novel optimization problem. Through a crowd-sourced evaluation, we verify that (1) while the original textbook images are rated higher, automatically assigned ones are not far behind, and (2) the choice of the optimization problem matters. We release the dataset of textbooks with an associated image bank to spur further research in this area.Comment: 17 pages, 27 figure