Impact of guided exploration and enactive exploration on self-regulatory mechanisms and information acquisition through electronic search.

Abstract

Following instruction in basic skills for electronic search, participants who practiced in a guided exploration mode developed stronger self-efficacy and greater satisfaction than those who practiced in a self-guided exploratory mode. Intrinsic motivation was not affected by exploration mode. On 2 post-training tasks, guided exploration participants produced more effective search strategies. expended less effort, made fewer errors, rejected fewer lines of search, and achieved higher performance. Relative lack of support for self-regulatory factors as mediators of exploration mode impacts was attributed to the uninformative feedback from electronic search, which causes most people to remain at a novice level and to require external guidance for development of self-efficacy and skills. Self-guided learning will be more effective on structured tasks with more informative feedback and for individuals with greater expertise on dynamic tasks.

Self-Regulation in Error Management Training: Emotion Control and Metacognition as Mediators of Performance Effects.

“…Additionally, other authors suggest that metacognition is important (Ivancic & Hesketh, 2000). (2) Emotion/motivation-based approaches investigate the emotional or motivational processes potentially facilitating or debilitating learning during training, such as intrinsic motivation (Debowski et al, 2001;Wood et al, 2000) or frustration (Chillarege et al, 2003;Nordstom et al, 1998). …”

“…These training experiments comprised one or more training phases and subsequent test phases which assessed performance in terms of number of correct task solutions (Chillarege et al, 2003;Debowski et al, 2001;Nordstrom et al, 1998;Wood et al, 2000), ratings of correctness, efficiency, and speed of solutions in difficult tasks (Dormann & Frese, 1994;Frese et al, 1991), or number of errors in transfer tasks (Ivancic & Hesketh, 2000). A recent study by Heimbeck et al (2003) highlighted the crucial role of error management instructions in error management training: Error management training was superior not only to error avoidant training but also to pure exploratory training without error management instructions.…”

“…Despite the growing body of research dealing with error management training, evidence illuminating the psychological mechanisms underlying its effectiveness remains scarce. Only a few studies explicitly looked at potentially mediating processes (Debowski et al, 2001;Wood et al, 2000), and none of these arrived at conclusive results. Our study aims to fill this gap by using both questionnaire and verbal protocol data to identify mediating processes in error management training.…”

Task complexity, vertical display and user interaction in aggregated search

“…Subjects' search experience was measured with a modified version of the Search Self-Efficacy Scale [10], which contained 14 items describing different search activities. Subjects indicated their confidence in completing each activity using a 10-point scale, where 1=totally unconfident and 10=totally confident.…”

Methods for Evaluating Interactive Information Retrieval Systems with Users

“…The effects of cognitive style on information-seeking behavior in mediated search situations have also been investigated by Ford et al [101]. Finally, computer and search self-efficacy have been studied as more refined measures of computer and search competency [57,71].…”