Effects of hyperlinks on navigation in virtual environments

Hyperlinks introduce discontinuities of movement to 3-D virtual environments (VEs). Nine independent attributes of hyperlinks are defined and their likely effects on navigation in VEs are discussed. Four experiments are described in which participants repeatedly navigated VEs that were either conventional (i.e. obeyed the laws of Euclidean space), or contained hyperlinks. Participants learned spatial knowledge slowly in both types of environment, echoing the findings of previous studies that used conventional VEs. The detrimental effects on participants' spatial knowledge of using hyperlinks for movement were reduced when a time-delay was introduced, but participants still developed less accurate knowledge than they did in the conventional VEs. Visual continuity had a greater influence on participants' rate of learning than continuity of movement, and participants were able to exploit hyperlinks that connected together disparate regions of a VE to reduce travel time

McDonnell, Lorraine M., and M. Stephen Weatherford, Evidence Use and the Common Core State Standards Movement: From Problem Definition to Policy Adoption, American Journal of Education, 120(November, 2013), 1-25.

Describes how policy entrepreneurs use research at three stages of the policy process--problem definition, policy design, and policy enactment; reports interviews with state leaders of the Common Core movement about these policy process stages and the use of research evidence; concludes that research was often not used or was not available and that other evidence was also used

McDonnell, Lorraine M., and M. Stephen Weatherford, Recognizing the Political in Implementation Research, Educational Researcher, 45(May, 2016), 233-242.

Analyzes elements of policy-making decisions and those of policy implementation; proposes integrating political dimensions into implementation research