Leveraging the power of aggregation to achieve an enhanced research environment

42 slides created with MSPower Point 2003 and migrated to pdf using Adobe PDF.Paper presented at the Stellenbosch University Library 2010 Symposium / IFLA Presidential Meeting. Knowing is not enough: Engaging in the knowledge economy, 18 to 19 February 2010. With advances in scholarly communication, the academic research world is becoming more global and collaborative. E-Science, for example, has introduced scientific projects on a whole new scale in terms of collaborative effort, the dissemination of information, technical infrastructure, and the amount of data that is generated. In this global environment, scholars’ quest for information transcends borders; indeed, every research document, no matter where it was created, can be accessed globally and its impact can be felt widely. Information providers publish a growing quantity of quality materials and disseminate them to institutions around the world. Institutions, for their part, are striving to offer and facilitate the searching of as many relevant information resources as can feasibly be provided to their users, given local resource constraints. Researchers, in turn, are faced with the challenge of searching in multiple, discrete information repositories or overcoming the limitations of metasearch systems, which are currently deployed in a large number of libraries. As a result, new services are emerging that are intended to help users in their research tasks. An example of such services is vendors’ provision of large aggregations of scholarly materials from diverse information providers, made possible through recent advances in technologies and the increasing willingness of most publishers to broaden access to their collections. Quick to embrace these aggregations, institutions have begun integrating them tightly with local library collections for the benefit of their users. With this growing amount of accessible scholarly data, scholars are in need of new tools to help them home in on the information that they seek instead of wading through masses of materials. The recent introduction of faceted categorization assists in this task, helping users refine large result sets intuitively. Other useful tools for researchers are system-generated recommendations that are based on the search behavior of scholars who previously searched for similar materials (as on e-commerce sites that tell users that “customers who bought this item also bought…”). Because research today is conducted with no regard to geographic location or institutional affiliation, a recommender service of this kind becomes even more meaningful with the increase in the body of information upon which it relies. This presentation will illustrate the power of aggregation in providing tools for today’s researchers and will draw on library examples to do this

Librarian Advisors for Undeclared Students: Understanding the Advisee Experience

Many institutional models exist for advising undeclared students, a group often requiring much guidance and support through the advising and discernment process. This research explored the experience of undeclared students with a librarian advisor. Fifteen students were interviewed after they declared a major to understand how they perceived their advising experience and their satisfaction with advising and their advisor. Overall, students reported feeling mostly satisfied with their librarian advisors. Most students would choose a librarian as their advisor again. Although interview data was largely positive, areas for improvement were identified

Individual Differences in Working Memory Capacity and Reading Comprehension of Electronic Texts

Technology is unquestionably changing the nature of education. Computers, tablets, e-readers, and cell phones are rapidly replacing print text and handwritten notes. These devices are not only the dominating sources of communication in current society; they also represent a connecting point between information and the minds of modern students. The term working memory refers to the immediate, transitory processing and storage that takes place as an individual completes higher-order cognitive tasks. Working memory has a clear relationship with learning, reasoning, and comprehension in the classroom (Baddeley, 1992). However, each individual has a working memory capacity (WMC) which limits how much information he or she can store and manipulate in a given period of time (Turner & Engle, 1989). Individuals with lower WMC, meaning the amount of simultaneous information they are able to process is limited, often have difficulties with reading comprehension (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980), are likely to experience distraction from extraneous information (Sanchez & Wiley, 2002), and are more prone to wind-wandering (McVay & Kane, 2009). At the same time, individuals with high WMC are less likely to experience these difficulties to such a debilitating degree. The majority of current research focuses on reading comprehension using print material. This study examines individual differences among WMC, reading duration, and comprehension using electronic texts in an effort to explore the role technology has on learning. An additional goal of this research is to determine if there is a relationship between WMC and eye fixation patterns while reading text, interacting with graphs, and viewing images. Participants first completed Operation Span to measure WMC, read selections from an electronic textbook while their eye fixations were monitored by a Tobii TX300 eye tracking system, answered questions about the material, and completed a demographics questionnaire. Data collection is ongoing

The Lived Experience of Postpartum Anxiety During COVID-19: A Hermeneutic Phenomenological Study

The experience of pregnancy and postpartum anxiety disorders results in adverse birth outcomes and the disrupted development of infants and children. Since the COVID-19 Pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has designated pregnant and postpartum women as more vulnerable to COVID-19 (CDC, 2021), and perinatal mood and anxiety disorders rates have increased. However, research regarding the lived experience of women with postpartum anxiety (PPA) during a global pandemic remains lacking. Using van Manen’s hermeneutic phenomenological research method, we interviewed eight women self-identifying as having had PPA during the COVID-19 pandemic. Analysis revealed five themes describing the lived experience of PPA during COVID-19: Wired, Trapped, Lost in Time, No Safety Net, and Doubting Myself. The lived experience of PPA was both mirrored and masked by the lived experience of a global pandemic, exacerbating PPA due to the unknown and constricting nature of the pandemic. These findings suggest the need for future research to include subjective human experiences as pivotal components in creating support practices and a deeper understanding of PPA in the context of unprecedented life events

The doors of opportunity: How do community partners experience working as co-educators in a service-learning collaboration?

This article explores the experiences of organisations participating as Community Partners (CPs) and co-educators in a service-learning module in a Higher Education Institution (HEI) in South Wales, UK. It focuses on the opportunities and challenges faced by community organisations when working within the Service-learning (SL) model, and the relationship with the university and the students, including issues of expectation, assessment and identity. The partners provided SL placements of 30 hours or more in a range of community projects and organisations. These placements were intensely collaborative affairs. We researched the experiences of community partners to better understand the dynamics of the relationship; to better understand how to prepare community partners, HEIs and students; and to tease out how complex partnership projects like this one with multiple partners may be conducted successfully. A qualitative study was conducted. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analysed using Reflexive Thematic Analysis. Three main themes emerged from the data: Dynamic Tensions; For Each and Every One; and Broadening Horizons. The findings suggest that developing a transformation of the relationship is key to a strong and effective partnership. There needs to be active and dynamic collaboration between CPs and HEIs, including involvement in research projects like these, to better understand and navigate the pleasures and pains of successful cooperative relationships

An Examination of Individual Differences in the Context of Performance on a Feedback v. No Feedback Vigilance Task

When a task is boring, repetitive, and takes place over a long period of time, individuals have a propensity to experience a gradual decline in performance known as the vigilance decrement (Mackworth, 1948). This negative trend is consistent across most populations (Davies & Parasuraman, 1982), though slight variations can occur based on the characteristics of the task, as well as characteristics of the human performing it. However, despite the many differences between these tasks, most studies are similar in the sense that, more often than not, participants are provided with immediate feedback on their performance throughout most laboratory trials. Yet, in applied settings, feedback is not always feasible. In fact, in many circumstances, if real-time feedback such as this was always available, then the role of the human component of the system may be brought into question. This also may be concerning for validity of laboratory studies which utilize feedback. Therefore, one goal of this experiment, as well as future work, is to continue to assess the importance of feedback by examining differences in performance on a vigilance task during which feedback may or may not be present. In addition to recent work relating to feedback, many current studies have also examined individual differences in the context of vigilance. Interestingly, it has been shown that performance accuracy often correlates to measures of higher order processing abilities including inhibition, which a component of working memory (Smallwood & Schooler, 2006). Additionally, when working memory load is increased, vigilant behavior also declines (Helton & Russell, 2011). Therefore, an additional goal of this study was to determine how performance relates to individual differences in higher order cognitive processing, such as working memory capacity and need for cognition. It was found that feedback does significantly improve performance, which is worth considering as issues relating to vigilance decrements are addressed in applied environments. The individual differences measures did not yield any significant results

The Impact of Criterion Shifts on Evidence Accumulation in the Inferior Temporal Cortex

Decision-making is a cognitive process that occurs in stages and can be conceptualized by variations of sequential sampling models which suggest that, for the options in a binary forced-choice decision-making task, there are opposing thresholds that the amount of evidence accumulated must cross before a selection is made (Ratcliff, 1978; Ratcliff & McKoon, 2008). That process is often influenced by prior knowledge that has the potential to bias an individual towards or away from given options, thereby changing the amount of associated sensory evidence processed over time (Dunovan & Wheeler, 2018). Meaning, when a criterion shift (prior knowledge) biases an individual toward the correct choice (a valid trial), younger adults have a propensity to take less time to respond, be more accurate in their responses, and show decreased BOLD activity in the inferior temporal cortex (ITC). Alternatively, the option biased against (an invalid trial) will take more time, produce poorer accuracy scores, and is associated with increased BOLD activity in the ITC. However, little is known about how well such results carry across the lifespan because current literature focuses mostly on younger adults. Older adults have a propensity to take their time during decision-making tasks and perform well, and it is believed they do so by behaving inflexibly when presented with prior knowledge. Younger adults are more likely to incorporate informative cues, while older adults tend to disregard them in favor of taking their time (Starns & Ratcliff, 2010). This fMRI work aimed to examine these conclusions from a lifespan perspective using a Posner-like cued face/house discrimination task. Special attention was paid to controlling for age-related sensory confounds. Contrary to the hypothesis that only younger adults would incorporate cues into their decision-making process, both age groups performed similarly and responded faster/more accurately for valid trials relative to invalid trials. However, the underlying trends in the ITC BOLD data were not consistent across age groups, suggesting that there are different neural mechanisms underlying the same behavioral outcomes as a function of age.M.S

Sexually selected sentinels? Evidence of a role for intrasexual competition in sentinel behavior.

Although the evolutionary mechanisms that favor investment in cooperative behaviors have long been a focus of research, comparatively few studies have considered the role that sexual selection may play. For example, evolutionary explanations for sentinel behavior (where 1 individual assumes an elevated position and scans the surroundings while other group members forage nearby) have traditionally focused on the inclusive fitness benefits arising from its effects on predation risk, while its potential role in defense against intrasexual competitors remains largely unexplored. Here, we provide experimental evidence of a role for sentinel behavior in intrasexual competition, in a cooperatively breeding songbird, the white-browed sparrow weaver (Plocepasser mahali). First, dominant males sentinel substantially more than other group members (even when controlling for variation in age and body condition), consistent with a role for sentineling in intrasexual competition for mates and/or territory. Second, experimental playback of an unfamiliar male's solo song elicited a marked increase in sentineling by the dominant male, and the vocal response to the playback also positively predicted his sentinel effort following the simulated intrusion. A second experiment also suggests that sentineling may facilitate mounting rapid anti-intruder responses, as responses to intruder-playback occurred significantly earlier when the dominant male was sentineling rather than foraging at playback onset. Together, our findings provide rare support for the hypothesis that sentinel behavior plays a role in intrasexual competition, and so highlight the potential for sexually selected direct benefits to shape its expression in this and other social vertebrates