Online learning has become a popular alternative to traditional schools, allowing flexible schedules and availability of accelerated programs. In spite of the positive attributes, online education faces some challenges, such as assessing student engagement, seen as an indicator of academic excellence. The literature reveals that existing…

Information used to assist biomedical and clinical research has largely comprised of data available in published sources like scientific papers and journals, or in clinical sources like patient health records, lab reports and discharge summaries. Information from such sources, though extensive and organized, is often not readily available due to…

Students often struggle to recall information on tests, frequently claiming to experience a "retrieval failure" of learned information. Thus, the retrieval of information from memory may be a roadblock to student success. I propose a relatively simple adjustment to the wording of test items to help eliminate this potential barrier.…

The "testing effect" refers to the striking phenomenon that repeated retrieval practice is one of the most effective learning strategies, and certainly more advantageous for long-term learning, than additional restudying of the same information. How retrieval can boost the retention of memories is still without unanimous explanation. In…

Design processes can be decomposed into several steps, including information acquisition and application. Retrieving prior knowledge and experience is an important method of acquiring design information, thus designers' precedents retrieval styles reflect their design thinking. The obvious difference between industrial (ID) and mechanical design…

This dissertation examines the impact of exploration and learning upon eDiscovery information retrieval; it is written in three parts. Part I contains foundational concepts and background on the topics of information retrieval and eDiscovery. This part informs the reader about the research frameworks, methodologies, data collection, and…

We studied the effects of menu type, navigation path complexity and spatial ability on information retrieval performance and web disorientation or lostness. Two innovative aspects were included: (a) navigation path relevance and (b) information gathering tasks. As expected we found that, when measuring aspects directly related to navigation…

With the adoption of web services in daily life, people have access to tremendous amounts of information, beyond any human's reading and comprehension capabilities. As a result, search technologies have become a fundamental tool for accessing information. Furthermore, the web contains information in multiple languages, introducing another barrier…

Millennial students make up a large portion of undergraduate students attending colleges and universities, and they have a variety of online resources available to them to complete academically related information searches, primarily Web based and library-based online information retrieval systems. The content, ease of use, and required search…

Information retrieval (IR) systems have tremendously broaden users' access to information. However, users need to select their needs from trillions of information indexed daily. Due to the "semantic gap" between queries and indexed terms in IR system, whether users can satisfy their needs depends on whether they use the correct terms as…

Several models of language acquisition have emerged in recent years that rely on computational algorithms for simulation and evaluation. Computational models are formal and precise, and can thus provide mathematically well-motivated insights into the process of language acquisition. Such models are amenable to robust computational evaluation,…

A study involving 106 fourth graders and two teachers from a school in Beijing investigated the impact of a peer-led, open-format discussion approach, called collaborative reasoning (CR), on students' reading comprehension and teacher's professional learning. Mixed results of effects of CR on children's reading comprehension were found. After…

Information Retrieval (IR) is one of the most evolving research fields and has drawn extensive attention in recent years. Because of its empirical nature, the advance of the IR field is closely related to the development of various toolkits. While the traditional IR toolkit mainly provides a platform to evaluate the effectiveness of retrieval…

To some, discussing the demise of the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system is tantamount to blasphemy, while to others it is a discussion long overdue (no pun intended). The author was asked, as an educator of librarians, to present her thoughts on the issue. Her conclusions are based not on thorough scientifically sound research, but rather…

We examined the basis of feeling-of-knowing judgments (FOK) in patients with schizophrenia. Such patients typically have impaired memory and awareness, but not metamemory-accuracy deficits. The magnitude of FOKs are lower for patients with schizophrenia than for healthy participants, but judgments equally predict memory performance. In healthy…