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Browsing by Author "Dennis, Alan R."
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Item Effects of E‐textbook Instructor Annotations on Learner Performance(Springer, 2016-08) Dennis, Alan R.; Abaci, Serdar; Morrone, Anastasia S.; Plaskoff, Joshua; McNamara, Kelly O.; Department of Education, School of EducationWith additional features and increasing cost advantages, e-textbooks are becoming a viable alternative to paper textbooks. One important feature offered by enhanced e-textbooks (e-textbooks with interactive functionality) is the ability for instructors to annotate passages with additional insights. This paper describes a pilot study that examines the effects of instructor e-textbook annotations on student learning as measured by multiple-choice and open-ended test items. Fifty-two college students in a business course were randomly assigned either a paper or an electronic version of a textbook chapter. Results show that the e-textbook group outperformed the paper textbook group on the open-ended test item, while both groups performed equally on the multiple-choice subject test. These results suggest that the instructional affordances that an interactive e-textbook provides may lead to higher-level learning.Item Information foraging on the web: The effects of “acceptable” Internet delays on multi-page information search behavior(2006-11) Taylor, Nolan J.; Dennis, Alan R.Web delays are a persistent and highly publicized problem. Long delays have been shown to reduce information search, but less is known about the impact of more modest “acceptable” delays — delays that do not substantially reduce user satisfaction. Prior research suggests that as the time and effort required to complete a task increases, decision-makers tend to reduce information search at the expense of decision quality. In this study, the effects of an acceptable time delay (seven seconds) on information search behavior were examined. Results showed that increased time and effort caused by acceptable delays provoked increased information search.Item Research Report: Modifying Paradigms—Individual Differences, Creativity Techniques, and Exposure to Ideas in Group Idea Generation(2001-09) Garfield, Monica J.; Taylor, Nolan J.; Dennis, Alan R.; Satzinger, John W.In today's networked economy, ideas that challenge existing business models and paradigms are becoming more important. This study investigated how individual differences, groupware-based creativity techniques, and ideas from others influenced the type of ideas that individuals generated. While individual differences were important (in that some individuals were inherently more likely to generate ideas that followed the existing problem paradigm while others were more likely to generate paradigm-modifying ideas that attempted to change the problem paradigm), the exposure to paradigm-modifying ideas from others and the use of intuitive groupware-based creativity techniques rather than analytical groupware-based creativity techniques were found to increase the number of paradigm-modifying ideas producedItem Situation Normality and the Shape of Search: The Effects of Time Delays and Information Presentation on Search Behavior(2013-05) Taylor, Nolan J.; Dennis, Alan R.; Cummings, Jeff W.Delays have become one of the most often cited complaints of web users. Long delays often cause users to abandon their searches, but how do tolerable delays affect information search behavior? Intuitively, we would expect that tolerable delays should induce decreased information search. We conducted two experiments and found that as delay increased, a point occurs at which time within-page information search increases; that is, search behavior remained the same until a tipping point occurs where delay increases the depth of search. We argue that situation normality explains this phenomenon; users have become accustomed to tolerable delays up to a point (our research suggests between 7 and 11 s), after which search behavior changes. That is, some delay is expected, but as delay becomes noticeable but not long enough to cause the abandonment of search, an increase occurs in the “stickiness” of webpages such that users examine more information on each page before moving to new pages. The net impact of tolerable delays was counterintuitive: tolerable delays had no impact on the total amount of data searched in the first experiment, but induced users to examine more data points in the second experiment.