A great deal of effort has gone into developing open-ended inquiry activities for science education as well as complex computer tools for accessing scientific data to help students learn science.To be successful with these tools and activities, students need to learn a set of inquiry skills and to develop a new mode of classroom work reflective inquiry.In this paper we describe the design of the Progress Portfolio, a software environment to promote reflective inquiry, and we examine the influences of the unique practices and features of classroom contexts on our design process.K@ywOrdS

CSCW systems and research aim to sustain productive relationships over btiers of time and space.For the most Pm ho~~re~er, tie CSCW literature has focused on sho~term relationships or collaborative episodes.Here, we examine in depth 26 Ienagthyemail relationships between students in ~wdes 7 to 12 and volunteer scientists who advised them on science projects.We illustrate the unique dynamics of these relationships, consider their technical and social demands, and discuss the potential for CSCW systems to help sustain long-term help relationships by better accommodating heir needs.

Our work focuses on providing computational support for informal communication among people who are geographically separated. To better understand the use of artifacts in communication, we looked at the contents of office whiteboards after they had been used in conversations. Our analysis revealed that whiteboards are used to present and discuss various classes of objects with specific semantic properties. We call these objects "conversational props," and we have come to think of a whiteboard as a conversational medium in which props are introduced and manipulated. This study motivated our design of the Conversation Board, an experimental prototype of a multi-user drawing tool which allows remote use of conversational props. We compare the Conversation Board to various other multi-user drawing tools along a number of dimensions.

The implications of index-word selection strategies for user success in interactive searching were investigated in two experiments. People were asked to find target information objects using a simple interactive keyword information retrieval system in which the number of referent terms assigned to each object was systematically varied. The results demonstrate that searcher success is markedly improved by greatly increasing the number of names per object. © 1990 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Students performed a variety of tasks using a statistics text presented either in conventional printed form or via the text browser “SuperBook” (Remde, Gomez and Landauer [18]). Students using SuperBook answered more search questions correctly, wrote higher quality “open-book” essays, and recalled certain incidental information better than students using the conventional text. Subjective ratings overwhelmingly favored SuperBook. The advantage of SuperBook appears to be particularly strong for questions that are not anticipated by the author's organization of a text.

SuperBook is a hypertext browsing system designed to improve the usability of conventional documents. Successive versions of SuperBook were evaluated in a series of behavioral studies. Students searched for information in a statistics text. presented either in conventional printed form or in SuperBook form. The best version of SuperBook enabled students to answer search questions more quickly and accurately than they could with the conventional text. Students wrote higher quality “open-book” essays using SuperBook than they did with the conventional text, and their subjective ratings of the documentation strongly favored SuperBook. This work is a case study of formative design-evaluation. Behavioral evaluation of the first version of SuperBook showed how design factors and user strategies affected search and established baseline performance measures with printed text. The second version of SuperBook was implemented with the goal of improving search accuracy and speed. User strategies that had proved effective in the first study were made very easy and attractive to use. System response time for common operations was greatly improved. Behavioral evaluation of the new SuperBook demonstrated its superiority to printed text and suggested additional improvements that were incorporated into “MiteyBook,” a SuperBook implementation for PC-size screens. Search with MiteyBook proved to be approximately 25 percent faster and 25 percent more accurate than that obtained with a conventional printed book.

Why do some people have much more difficulty than others in learning a computer-based skill? To answer this question, we observed first-time users of computers as they learned to use a computer text editor. In two experiments, older people had more trouble than younger people and those who scored low on a standard test of spatial memory had greater difficulty than high scorers. These correlations were stable over several hours of practice and did not vary as a function of the type of terminal used or specific editing problems attempted. Correlations involving age and spatial memory could not be explained by other characteristics such as amount of education, reasoning ability, or associative memory ability. Results like these that relate learning difficulty to specific characteristics of people ultimately may suggest ways to change computer interface design or training to accommodate a wider range of users.

In previous studies two background characteristics of computer novices were consistently correlated with their success in learning to use a line-based computer text editor. Older people and those who scored low on a standard test of Spatial Memory had more difficulty than younger people and those with higher Spatial Memory test scores. In the present study, we observed computer novices as they learned to use a screen-based editor, which presumably reduced spatial memory load. Contrary to expectations, performance using a screen-based editor was again strongly correlated with Spatial Memory test scores. However, the correlation between performance and subjects' age was significantly reduced. Overall, subjects were able to perform the same text editing exercises almost twice as fast using the screen editor compared to subjects in previous experiments using the line editor. These results are discussed in terms of the different cognitive demands placed on users by line and screen text editors.

Today, it is not unusual for secretaries to use computer-based word-processing systems to deal with manuscripts, correspondence, and memos. In the future, such functions as updating personal calendars, filing, and leaving messages undoubtedly will be handled by computers. For all these functions, people without a technical background are required to interact effectively with a computer system.

The descriptors or categories assigned to entries in an information system form the basis of most retrieval mechanisms (e.g., menu or key word). These descriptors are the primary means of communication between system designers and end users. In this paper we analyze some of the factors which influence this communication link. Our goal is to uncover some psychological principles that will help us to understand naming and describing behavior and thus improve the communication between designers and users.