Effect of in-app components, medium, and screen size of electronic textbooks on reading performance, behavior, and perception

Although many app-based textbooks are available for students, reading have not been thoroughly outlined. This study aimed to understand how changes from paper to electronic textbooks have affected the academic reading task, investigate student users’ perceptions of in-app components and screen sizes, and identify issues affecting in-app components and task requirements. A mixed factorial design experiment was employed. Results showed that there were no significant changes in comprehension and time spent reading between print text and the iPad. Yet, student highlighting, notetaking, and reading behavior and perception significantly changed based on condition. In addition, students struggled to use in-app components and found them frustrating especially when accounting for sentence splitting. The findings presented can assist in understanding the changes in student reading behavior, which can be used to improve interface design of future e-textbooks

The Relationship Between Monochronicity, Polychronicity and Individual Characteristics

With the increasing complexity of control rooms and the information explosion, effective multitasking is now desired. Monochronicity and polychronicity, which describe a person’s ability to do one thing and many things at a time, respectively, have been studied for a long time. However, it is not clear these abilities are related to various individual characteristics. Forty-eight Chinese participants were tested on their perception, memory, judgment, attention ability and cognitive style. They also performed a task that required search and calculation under three conditions of unpaced, paced, and paced with sequencing. There were significant differences in the performance and strategy between monochronic and polychronic individuals in the selective attention test. Monochronic individuals focused their attention on the primary task and achieved higher performance. Polychronic individuals had somewhat better total performance in more than one task under time-constrained conditions. The results clearly indicate that an individual’s time use behaviors ought to be considered in training and control scenarios to account for differences among people

A comparison between Chinese and Caucasian head shapes

Univariate anthropometric data have long documented a difference in head shape proportion between Chinese and Caucasian populations. This difference has made it impossible to create eyewear, helmets and facemasks that fit both groups well. However, it has been unknown to what extend and precisely how the two populations differ from each other in form. In this study, we applied geometric morphometrics to dense surface data to quantify and characterize the shape differences using a large data set from two recent 3D anthropometric surveys, one in North America and Europe, and one in China. The comparison showed the significant variations between head shapes of the two groups and results demonstrated that Chinese heads were rounder than Caucasian counterparts, with a flatter back and forehead. The quantitative measurements and analyses of these shape differences may be applied in many fields, including anthropometrics, product design, cranial surgery and cranial therapy.Peer reviewed: YesNRC publication: Ye

Emotion deep dive for designers: Seven propositions that operationalize emotions in design innovation

This paper presents a five-day intense course that teaches “emotion-driven design”(EDD) to graduate students with a broad variety of disciplinary backgrounds at theFaculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University. We introduce seven principlesdrawn from design-relevant emotion knowledge that informed the design of thecourse’s overall structure, and explain how they guided the development of learningactivities and materials. We envision that this paper will interest design educatorswho aspire teaching how to operationalize emotions in creative design processes tostudents with little preexisting expertise in (or scientific knowledge about) emotionpsychology