'I’m just not sure': the persistence of uncertainty in the information seeking of undergraduate students with dyslexia

As information seeking progresses, it is expected feelings of uncertainty surrounding, for example, the information need, what information will be useful to satisfy the need and how well the need has been satisfied will shift towards confidence and clarity. The six corollaries offered by Kuhlthau outline and explain areas where this shift can happen. However, does it happen for all groups of information-seekers? Undergraduate students with dyslexia often have lower information seeking-related self-efficacy than their peers and this can result in uncertainty persisting throughout information seeking. Retrospective naturalistic think aloud observations were held with 20 undergraduate students with dyslexia. After looking for information for one of their (self-chosen) assignments, participants were invited to explore their thoughts, feelings and actions with the researcher while watching a screen recording of their information seeking session. First, an inductive reflexive Thematic Analysis was conducted which revealed self-efficacy to be a key influence in the information seeking behaviour of undergraduate students with dyslexia. To investigate this further, a dedicated deductive analysis was conducted leveraging Kuhlthau’s six corollaries. The expected shift away from uncertainty towards clarity and confidence was found to be either delayed, disrupted or prevented by participants’ low self-efficacy surrounding selecting and spelling keywords and reading, interpreting and evaluating information online. Uncertainty persisted throughout information seeking and was rarely reduced or resolved. Key areas for additional support during information seeking for this user group are identified, including keyword selection and spelling, accurate reading and interpretation and confident evaluation of online information.Peer Reviewe

Precarity and progression during a pandemic: preliminary findings from a study of early career academics’ information behaviour during COVID-19

COVID-19 has increased research, teaching and administrative pressures for all academics and, by doing so, exacerbated inequalities experienced by early career academics (ECAs), who were already dealing with several sources of uncertainty in trying to establish their careers. This study sought to understand the experiences of ECAs during the pandemic. We conducted semi-structured remote interviews with 18 ECAs (PhDs awarded in past 6 years), from a variety of countries; Canada, US, Australia, UK, New Zealand, and South Africa.Analysis. Interviews were analysed using a reflexive inductive Thematic Analysis approach (Braun and Clarke, 2021). Preliminary findings demonstrate that the pandemic has disrupted information acquisition and sharing among ECAs. The increasing amount of incorrect and irrelevant information disseminated by universities, alongside the de-prioritisation of information that is particularly valued by ECAs (e.g., information related to professional development and career development) has led some ECAs to avoid information. The COVID-19 pandemic has further exacerbated the precarious situations ECAs face. Universities need to acknowledge uncertainty, reduce information overload by providing relevant and useful information and provide useful information on and support for ECA career progression.Peer Reviewe

Social and interactional practices for disseminating current awareness information in an organisational setting.

Current awareness services are designed to keep users informed about recent developments based around user need profiles. In organisational settings, they may operate through both electronic and social interactions aimed at delivering information that is relevant, pertinent and current. Understanding these interactions can reveal the tensions in current awareness dissemination and help inform ways of making services more effective and efficient. We report an in-depth, observational study of electronic current awareness use within a large London law firm. The study found that selection, re-aggregation and forwarding of information by multiple actors gives rise to a complex sociotechnical distribution network. Knowledge management staff act as a layer of “intelligent filters” sensitive to complex, local information needs; their distribution decisions address multiple situational relevance factors in a situation fraught with information overload and restrictive time-pressures. Their decisions aim to optimise conflicting constraints of recall, precision and information quantity. Critical to this is the use of dynamic profile updates which propagate back through the network through formal and informal social interactions. This supports changes to situational relevance judgements and so allows the network to ‘self-tune’. These findings lead to design requirements, including that systems should support rapid assessment of information items against an individual’s interests; that it should be possible to organise information for different subsequent uses; and that there should be back-propagation from information consumers to providers, to tune the understanding of their information needs

Investigating the information-seeking behaviour of academic lawyers: From Ellis's model to design.

Information-seeking is important for lawyers, who have access to many dedicated electronic resources.However there is considerable scope for improving the design of these resources to better support information-seeking. One way of informing design is to use information-seeking models as theoretical lenses to analyse users’ behaviour with existing systems. However many models, including those informed by studying lawyers, analyse information-seeking at a high level of abstraction and are only likely to lead to broad-scoped design insights. We illustrate that one potentially useful (and lowerlevel) model is Ellis’s - by using it as a lens to analyse and make design suggestions based on the information-seeking behaviour of twenty-seven academic lawyers, who were asked to think aloud whilst using electronic legal resources to find information for their work. We identify similar information-seeking behaviours to those originally found by Ellis and his colleagues in scientific domains, along with several that were not identified in previous studies such as ‘updating’ (which we believe is particularly pertinent to legal information-seeking). We also present a refinement of Ellis’s model based on the identification of several levels that the behaviours were found to operate at and the identification of sets of mutually exclusive subtypes of behaviours

GenderMag: A Method for Evaluating Software’s Gender Inclusiveness

In recent years, research into gender differences has established that individual differences in how people problem-solve often cluster by gender. Research also shows that these differences have direct implications for software that aims to support users’ problem-solving activities, and that much of this software is more supportive of problem-solving processes favored (statistically) more by males than by females. However, there is almost no work considering how software practitioners—such as User Experience (UX) professionals or software developers—can find gender-inclusiveness issues like these in their software. To address this gap, we devised the GenderMag method for evaluating problem-solving software from a gender-inclusiveness perspective. The method includes a set of faceted personas that bring five facets of gender difference research to life, and embeds use of the personas into a concrete process through a gender-specialized Cognitive Walkthrough. Our empirical results show that a variety of practitioners who design software—without needing any background in gender research—were able to use the GenderMag method to find gender-inclusiveness issues in problem-solving software. Our results also show that the issues the practitioners found were real and fixable. This work is the first systematic method to find gender-inclusiveness issues in software, so that practitioners can design and produce problem-solving software that is more usable by everyone

Evaluating system utility and conceptual fit using CASSM

There is a wealth of user-centred evaluation methods (UEMs) to support the analyst in assessing interactive systems. Many of these support detailed aspects of use – for example: Is the feedback helpful? Are labels appropriate? Is the task structure optimal? Few UEMs encourage the analyst to step back and consider how well a system supports users’ conceptual understandings and system utility. In this paper, we present CASSM, a method which focuses on the quality of ‘fit’ between users and an interactive system. We describe the methodology of conducting a CASSM analysis and illustrate the approach with three contrasting worked examples (a robotic arm, a digital library system and a drawing tool) that demonstrate different depths of analysis. We show how CASSM can help identify re-design possibilities to improve system utility. CASSM complements established evaluation methods by focusing on conceptual structures rather than procedures. Prototype tool support for completing a CASSM analysis is provided by Cassata, an open source development