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Computer Interfaces Can Stimulate or Undermine Students’ Ability to Think
Abstract
Computer input capabilities, such as a keyboard or pen, substantially influence basic cognitive abilities, including our ability to produce appropriate ideas, solve problems correctly, and make accurate inferences about information. Compared with keyboard interfaces, computer input tools that can be used to express information involving different representations, modalities, and linguistic codes—or expressively powerful interfaces—can directly stimulate human thought and performance. This chapter summarizes how and why the quality of a computer interface matters. It also discusses implications for establishing a new generation of digital tools that are far better at supporting thinking and reasoning, with special implications for designing more effective educational technologies.
... Efforts to decrease cognitive load are associated with increased understanding and comprehension of the information presented (Kalyuga, 2011;Sweller, 2021;Sweller, 2011;Skulmowski and Xu, 2021). Designers seeking to create interfaces that are easy for users to navigate tend to concentrate efforts on enhancing cognitive fluency (Antle and Wise, 2013;Martin, 2014;Oviatt et al., 2012;Oviatt, 2016). Ultimately, users should not have to extend a lot of cognitive effort to understand what a dataset's title refers to. ...
Open government data is considered an innovative tool for enhancing government transparency, accountability, and public participation. Yet, despite widespread adoption and implementation of open data policies at all levels of government, open data use remains relatively low, prompting questions about whether open data policies have fulfilled their potential. In an effort to understand the barriers to open data use, recent studies have examined the usability of open data, including the functionality of open data portals as well as the quality of the datasets provided on them. As such, data quality is considered essential for open data usability and, in turn, open data use. Yet, empirical examinations of how and to what extent usability factors actually affect open data use are lacking. This mixed-methods study examines the open data portals of 15 U.S. cities (N= 5863 datasets) to answer two questions. First, to what extent do the affordances of open government data portals promote open data quality and usability? Second, how do efforts to improve data quality and promote usability influence open data use? To answer these questions, this study relies first on qualitative content analysis to identify data quality and usability attributes that promote OGD usability. Then, using the number of views and downloads of each dataset as quantitative measures of use, I test the impact of the attributes I identified on rates of This is a working paper. Please do not cite without author's permission. open data use. Findings point to positive effects of organizations' efforts to improve data quality and usability attributes on rates of open data use. Still, there was considerable variation across the cities in regard to the extent to which they leveraged the affordances of the platform to promote open data usability. This research advances our understanding of how efforts to improve the usability of government information (open data) shape transparency initiatives and outcomes. Specifically, how efforts can improve or impede OGD usability. In doing so, the study also provides practical and actionable steps that organizations can take to improve the usability of the open data they publish and more effectively engage the public as a result.
Digital screen is the main pattern of the digital revolution. Around the world schools and universities, changes printed pages in favour of digital screens, creating innovative platforms for learning and assessment methodologies, however many others keep the traditional approaches of teaching and printed textbooks. The new paradigm of learning is focused on development the vital competence for sustainability. Although educational system has been opened by the globalisation, the diversity of digital screens is a big challenge for this process. How digital affects the opening process of the educational system and, therefore, changes the behaviour? This scientific question inspired the ideas presented in this chapter. The aim of this chapter is to compare the features of digital screen with the intention of multiliteracies’ learning.
The WIPTTE High School Contest was held on the first day of the WIPTTE conference on the Microsoft Campus in Redmond, Washington. The High School Contest is an annual event originating in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, which extended into the WIPTTE conference. 2015 marked the second year of the WIPTTE High School Contest. During the contest, high school students participate in an intense day of brainstorming, design, prototyping, and presentation to compete against top schools across the United States. Nineteen high school and middle school students combined into four teams from two different schools: Renton Prep from Renton, WA, and University Prep from Seattle, WA. The high school students participated in many elements of WIPTTE throughout the Contest, including watching and commenting on the opening keynotes and presenting for the entire WIPTTE audience. Additionally, many students were able to participate in all three days of the conference. The students were active and engaged in the WIPTTE community, particularly while providing valuable feedback during the You-Try-It sessions.
Although previous literature suggests that writing practice facilitates neural specialization for letters, it is unclear if this facilitation is driven by the perceptual feedback from the act of writing or the actual execution of the motor act. The present study addresses this issue by measuring the change in BOLD signal in response to hand-printed letters, unlearned cursive letters, and cursive letters that 7-year-old children learned actively, by writing, and passively, by observing an experimenter write. Brain activation was assessed using fMRI while perceiving letters-in both cursive and manuscript forms. Results showed that active training led to increased recruitment of the sensori-motor network associated with letter perception as well as the insula and claustrum, but passive observation did not. This suggests that perceptual networks for newly learned cursive letters are driven by motor execution rather than by perceptual feedback.
Do the neural circuits for reading vary across culture? Reading of visually complex writing systems such as Chinese has been proposed to rely on areas outside the classical left-hemisphere network for alphabetic reading. Here, however, we show that, once potential confounds in cross-cultural comparisons are controlled for by presenting handwritten stimuli to both Chinese and French readers, the underlying network for visual word recognition may be more universal than previously suspected. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging in a semantic task with words written in cursive font, we demonstrate that two universal circuits, a shape recognition system (reading by eye) and a gesture recognition system (reading by hand), are similarly activated and show identical patterns of activation and repetition priming in the two language groups. These activations cover most of the brain regions previously associated with culture-specific tuning. Our results point to an extended reading network that invariably comprises the occipitotemporal visual word-form system, which is sensitive to well-formed static letter strings, and a distinct left premotor region, Exner's area, which is sensitive to the forward or backward direction with which cursive letters are dynamically presented. These findings suggest that cultural effects in reading merely modulate a fixed set of invariant macroscopic brain circuits, depending on surface features of orthographies.
The topic of this chapter is the measurement of students' self-regulated learning (SRL) and its components. The first section develops key points about measurement in general. In the second section, the authors describe a model of SRL and its components that researchers seek to measure—metacognition, intrinsic motivation, strategic action. Currently used protocols are surveyed, including questionnaires, structured interviews, teacher ratings, think aloud methods, error detection tasks, trace methodologies, and observations. Finally, the authors critique these current protocols and forecast what measurements of SRL might be like in the future. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
From a theoretical viewpoint, educational interfaces that facilitate communicative actions involving representations central
to a domain can maximize students’ effort associated with constructing new schemas. In addition, interfaces that minimize
working memory demands due to the interface per se, for example by mimicking existing non-digital work practice, can preserve
students’ attentional focus on their learning task. In this research, we asked the question: What type of interface input capabilities provide best support for science problem solving in both low- and high-performing students? High school students’ ability to solve a diverse range of biology problems was compared over longitudinal sessions while
they used: (1) hardcopy paper and pencil (2) a digital paper and pen interface (3) pen tablet interface, and (4) graphical
tablet interface. Post-test evaluations revealed that time to solve problems, meta-cognitive control, solution correctness,
and memory all were significantly enhanced when using the digital pen and paper interface, compared with tablet interfaces.
The tangible pen and paper interface also was the only alternative that significantly facilitated skill acquisition in low-performing
students. Paradoxically, all students nonetheless believed that the tablet interfaces provided best support for their performance,
revealing a lack of self-awareness about how to use computational tools to best advantage. Implications are discussed for
how pen interfaces can be optimized for future educational purposes, and for establishing technology fluency curricula to
improve students’ awareness of the impact of digital tools on their performance.
KeywordsEducational interface tools and design-Biology problem solving-Pen interfaces-Digital paper and pen-Low-performing students-Meta-cognitive self-awareness
Typing in an Indian language is currently not an easy task. Significant training is required before one can achieve an acceptable speed and only professional typists make the investment. Part of the complexity arises due to the structure of Indic scripts and large number of characters in each script. Solutions to input text in Indic languages have been around for a while, but none of these are usable enough to emerge as the de-facto standard. Here we describe the design of a new keyboard based on the structure of the Indic alphabet. The project went through cycles of design, prototyping and user evaluation. The evaluation was done by multiple techniques - usability tests, informal demonstrations, road shows and a typing competition. We particularly found the road shows and the competition useful for gathering feedback for this type of products.
As technical as we have become, modern computing has not permeated many important areas of our lives, including mathematics education which still involves pencil and pa- per. In the present study, twenty high school geometry stu- dents varying in ability from low to high participated in a comparative assessment of math problem solving using existing pencil and paper work practice (PP), and three different interfaces: an Anoto-based digital stylus and pa- per interface (DP), pen tablet interface (PT), and graphical tablet interface (GT). Cognitive Load Theory correctly predicted that as interfaces departed more from familiar work practice (GT > PT > DP), students would experience greater cognitive load such that performance would dete- riorate in speed, attentional focus, meta-cognitive control, correctness of problem solutions, and memory. In addition, low-performing students experienced elevated cognitive load, with the more challenging interfaces (GT, PT) dis- rupting their performance disproportionately more than higher performers. The present results indicate that Cogni- tive Load Theory provides a coherent and powerful basis for predicting the rank ordering of users' performance by type of interface. In the future, new interfaces for areas like education and mobile computing could benefit from de- signs that minimize users' load so performance is more adequately supported.
Experience alters behavior by producing enduring changes in the neural processes that support performance. For example, performing a specific action improves the execution of that action via changes in associated sensory and motor neural circuitry, and experience using language improves language comprehension by altering the anatomy and physiology of perisylvian neocortical brain regions. Here we provide evidence that specialized (sports) motor experience enhances action-related language understanding by recruitment of left dorsal lateral premotor cortex, a region normally devoted to higher-level action selection and implementation—even when there is no intention to perform a real action. Experience playing and watching sports has enduring effects on language understanding by changing the neural networks that subserve comprehension to incorporate areas active in performing sports skills. Without such experience, sport novices recruit lower-level sensory-motor regions, thought to support the instantiation of movement, during language processing, and activity in primary motor areas does not help comprehension. Thus, the language system is sufficiently plastic and dynamic to encompass expertise-related neural recruitment outside core language networks.
• expertise
• premotor
• action planning
• motor stimulation
• comprehension
Archaeology can provide two bodies of information relevant to the understanding of the evolution of human cognition--the timing of developments, and the evolutionary context of these developments. The challenge is methodological. Archaeology must document attributes that have direct implications for underlying cognitive mechanisms. One example of such a cognitive archaeology is found in spatial cognition. The archaeological record documents an evolutionary sequence that begins with ape-equivalent spatial abilities 2.5 million years ago and ends with the appearance of modern abilities in the still remote past of 400,000 years ago. The timing of these developments reveals two major episodes in the evolution in spatial ability, one, 1.5 million years ago and the other, one million years later. The two episodes of development in spatial cognition had very different evolutionary contexts. The first was associated with the shift to an open country adaptive niche that occurred early in the time range of Homo erectus. The second was associated with no clear adaptive shift, though it does appear to have coincided with the invasion of more hostile environments and the appearance of systematic hunting of large mammals. Neither, however, occurred in a context of modern hunting and gathering.
A large body of data supports the view that movement plays a crucial role in letter representation and suggests that handwriting contributes to the visual recognition of letters. If so, changing the motor conditions while children are learning to write by using a method based on typing instead of handwriting should affect their subsequent letter recognition performances. In order to test this hypothesis, we trained two groups of 38 children (aged 3-5 years) to copy letters of the alphabet either by hand or by typing them. After three weeks of learning, we ran two recognition tests, one week apart, to compare the letter recognition performances of the two groups. The results showed that in the older children, the handwriting training gave rise to a better letter recognition than the typing training.
Fast and accurate visual recognition of single characters is crucial for efficient reading. We explored the possible contribution of writing memory to character recognition processes. We evaluated the ability of adults to discriminate new characters from their mirror images after being taught how to produce the characters either by traditional pen-and-paper writing or with a computer keyboard. After training, we found stronger and longer lasting (several weeks) facilitation in recognizing the orientation of characters that had been written by hand compared to those typed. Functional magnetic resonance imaging recordings indicated that the response mode during learning is associated with distinct pathways during recognition of graphic shapes. Greater activity related to handwriting learning and normal letter identification was observed in several brain regions known to be involved in the execution, imagery, and observation of actions, in particular, the left Broca's area and bilateral inferior parietal lobules. Taken together, these results provide strong arguments in favor of the view that the specific movements memorized when learning how to write participate in the visual recognition of graphic shapes and letters.
The Design of Future Educational Interfaces provides a new multidisciplinary synthesis of educational interface research. It explains how computer interfaces can be redesigned to better support our ability to produce ideas, think, and solve problems successfully in national priority areas such as science and mathematics. Based on first-hand research experience, the author offers a candid analysis of emerging technologies and their impact, highlighting communication interfaces that stimulate thought. The research results will surprise readers and challenge their assumptions about existing technology and its ability to support our performance.
During the last decade, cell phones with multimodal interfaces based on combined new media have become the dominant computer interface worldwide. Multimodal interfaces support mobility and expand the expressive power of human input to computers. They have shifted the fulcrum of human-computer interaction much closer to the human. This book explains the foundation of human-centered multimodal interaction and interface design, based on the cognitive and neurosciences, as well as the major benefits of multimodal interfaces for human cognition and performance. It describes the data-intensive methodologies used to envision, prototype, and evaluate new multimodal interfaces. From a system development viewpoint, this book outlines major approaches for multimodal signal processing, fusion, architectures, and techniques for robustly interpreting users' meaning. Multimodal interfaces have been commercialized extensively for field and mobile applications during the last decade. Research also is growing rapi...
This article presents two studies investigating how computer interface affordances influence basic cognition, including ideational fluency, problem solving, and inferential reasoning. In one study comparing interfaces with different input capabilities, students expressed 56% more nonlinguistic representations (diagrams, symbols, numbers) when using pen interfaces. A linear regression confirmed that nonlinguistic communication directly mediated a substantial increase (38.5%) in students' ability to produce appropriate science ideas. In contrast, students expressed 41% more linguistic content when using a keyboard-based interface, which mediated a drop in science ideation. A follow-up study pursued the question of how interfaces that prime nonlinguistic communication so effectively facilitate cognition. This study examined the relation between students' expression of nonlinguistic representations and their inference accuracy when using analogous digital and non-digital pen tools. Perhaps surprisingly, the digital pen interface stimulated construction of more diagrams, more correct Venn diagrams, and more accurate domain inferences. Students' construction of multiple diagrams to represent a problem also directly suppressed overgeneralization errors, which were the most common inference failure. These research results reveal that computer interfaces have communications affordances which elicit communication patterns that can substantially stimulate or impede basic cognition. Implications are discussed for designing new digital tools for thinking, with an emphasis on nonlinguistic and especially spatial representations that are most poorly supported by current keyboard-based interfaces.
Fourth graders with learning disabilities in transcription (handwriting and spelling), LD-TD, and without LD-TD (non-LD), were compared on three writing tasks (letters, sentences, and essays), which differed by level of language, when writing by pen and by keyboard. The two groups did not differ significantly in Verbal IQ but did in handwriting, spelling, and composing achievement. Although LD-TD and non-LD groups did not differ in total time for producing letters by pen or keyboard, both groups took longer to compose sentences and essays by keyboard than by pen. Students in both groups tended to show the same pattern of results for amount written as a larger sample of typically developing fourth graders who composed longer essays by pen. Results for that sample, which also included typically developing second and sixth graders, showed that effects of transcription mode vary with level of language and within level of language by grade level for letters and sentences. However, consistently from second to fourth to sixth grade, children wrote longer essays with faster word production rate by pen than by keyboard. In addition, fourth and sixth graders wrote more complete sentences when writing by pen than by keyboard, and this relative advantage for sentence composing in text was not affected by spelling ability. Implications of the results for using computers for accommodations or specialized instruction for students with LD-TD are discussed.
In an age of increasing technology, the possibility that typing on a keyboard will replace handwriting
raises questions about the future usefulness of handwriting skills. Here we present evidence that brain
activation during letter perception is influenced in different, important ways by previous handwriting of
letters versus previous typing or tracing of those same letters. Preliterate, five-year old children printed,
typed, or traced letters and shapes, then were shown images of these stimuli while undergoing
functional MRI scanning. A previously documented ‘‘reading circuit’’ was recruited during letter
perception only after handwriting—not after typing or tracing experience. These findings demonstrate
that handwriting is important for the early recruitment in letter processing of brain regions known to
underlie successful reading. Handwriting therefore may facilitate reading acquisition in young children.
Unlike documents, annotation for multimedia information needs to be input as text, not in the form of symbols such as underlines and circles. This is problematic with keyboard input for non-alphabetical languages, especially the East Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese, because it is labor intensive and imposes a high cognitive load. This study provides a quantitative analysis of the effectiveness of making annotations by hand during a note-taking task in Japanese. Although the lessons learned from this study come from Japanese text input, they are also generally applicable to other East Asian Languages which use ideographic characters such as Chinese. In our study, we focused on both the ergonomic and cognitive aspects and found that during annotation and note-taking task input by hand is more effective than input by keyboard. Finally, we anatomized the keyboard input problem and discuss it in this paper.
Since Broca's studies on language processing, cortical functional specialization has been considered to be integral to efficient neural processing. A fundamental question in cognitive neuroscience concerns the type of learning that is required for functional specialization to develop. To address this issue with respect to the development of neural specialization for letters, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare brain activation patterns in pre-school children before and after different letter-learning conditions: a sensori-motor group practised printing letters during the learning phase, while the control group practised visual recognition. Results demonstrated an overall left-hemisphere bias for processing letters in these pre-literate participants, but, more interestingly, showed enhanced blood oxygen-level-dependent activation in the visual association cortex during letter perception only after sensori-motor (printing) learning. It is concluded that sensori-motor experience augments processing in the visual system of pre-school children. The change of activation in these neural circuits provides important evidence that 'learning-by-doing' can lay the foundation for, and potentially strengthen, the neural systems used for visual letter recognition.
Brain imaging studies reliably localize a region of visual cortex that is especially responsive to visual words. This brain specialization is essential to rapid reading ability because it enhances perception of words by becoming specifically tuned to recurring properties of a writing system. The origin of this specialization poses a challenge for evolutionary accounts involving innate mechanisms for functional brain organization. We propose an alternative account, based on studies of other forms of visual expertise (i.e. bird and car experts) that lead to functional reorganization. We argue that the interplay between the unique demands of word reading and the structural constraints of the visual system lead to the emergence of the Visual Word Form Area.
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