Although youth are increasingly going online to fulfill their needs for information, many youth struggle with information and digital literacy skills, such as the abilities to conduct a search and assess the credibility of online information. Ideally, these skills encompass an accurate and comprehensive understanding of the ways in which a system, such as a Web search engine, functions. In order to investigate youths' conceptions of the Google search engine, a drawing activity was conducted with 26 HackHealth after-school program participants to elicit their mental models of Google. The findings revealed that many participants personified Google and emphasized anthropomorphic elements, computing equipment, and/or connections (such as cables, satellites and antennas) in their drawings. Far fewer participants focused their drawings on the actual Google interface or on computer code. Overall, their drawings suggest a limited understanding of Google and the ways in which it actually works. However, an understanding of youths' conceptions of Google can enable educators to better tailor their digital literacy instruction efforts and can inform search engine developers and search engine interface designers in making the inner workings of the engine more transparent and their output more trustworthy to young users. With a better understanding of how Google works, young users will be better able to construct effective queries, assess search results, and ultimately find relevant and trustworthy information that will be of use to them.

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There’s a creepy guy on the other end at Google!: engaging middle school students in a drawing activity to elicit their mental models of Google

Large truck and bus crashes still cause a high rate of fatalities and costs. Considering that the human factor plays an important role it is obvious that there is great interest in predicting safe driving performance in professional drivers, especially with new technologies emerging to assist drivers. This study uses a modern theoretical framework to assess which psychometric tests are still able to predict safe driving performance in today’s professional drivers under these new circumstances. 126 male professional bus drivers completed a standardized digital test battery and three driving exercises. The test battery was used to assess reaction time, concentration, ability to gain an overview, reactive stress tolerance, logical reasoning, and safety-related personality traits. The exercises consisted of an on-road driving test, an obstacle course, and a maneuvering course. The study yielded satisfactory indicators of criterion related validity. It also showed that different tests were relevant for the prediction of safe driving performance in different driving exercises. Contrary to previous research, logical reasoning showed significant effects. The results indicate that in order to assess safe driving performance in professional drivers, a comprehensive assessment with psychometric tests should be recommended.

Cognitive and personality determinants of safe driving performance in professional drivers

Technology increasingly offers parents more and more opportunities to monitor children, reshaping the way control and autonomy are negotiated within families. This paper investigates the views of parents and primary school children on mobile technology designed to support child independent mobility in the context of the local walking school buses. Based on a school-year long field study, we report findings on children's and parents' experience with proximity detection devices. The results provide insights into how the parents and children accepted and socially appropriated the technology into the walking school bus activity, shedding light on the way they understand and conceptualize a technology that collects data on children's proximity to the volunteers' smartphone. We discuss parents' needs and concerns toward monitoring technologies and the related challenges in terms of trust-control balance. These insights are elaborated to inform the future design of technology for child independent mobility.

A Walk on the Child Side: Investigating Parents' and Children's Experience and Perspective on Mobile Technology for Outdoor Child Independent Mobility

The rationale of any national screening programme is to recognize the benefits for public health, to test a predominantly healthy population including low risk pregnant women, and to detect risk factors for morbidity in order to provide timely care interventions. The South African health care system faces many challenges that undoubtedly impact on maternal health, resulting in poor quality of care and indirectly causing maternal deaths. The government has embarked on a number of initiatives that address women’s psychosocial wellbeing during pregnancy, for example free maternity care, legalizing abortion, expanding on provider-initiated HIV counseling and testing for antenatal patients. These initiatives imply a re-look at antenatal care screening, in order to identify wider determinants of health that may have an impact on a woman’s psychosocial wellbeing. This includes amongst others, poor socio-economic conditions such as poverty, lack of social support, general health inequalities, domestic violence and a history of either personal or familial mental illness, all of which have the capacity to influence a pregnant woman’s decision to utilize health care services. The intention of this study was therefore to establish the extent of psychosocial risk assessment for pregnant women during antenatal care, with a focus on the psychosocial support.Ethical clearance was obtained from the University of the Witwatersrand Human Research Ethics Committee (Protocol no. M081013). A mixed-method approach was applied through combining quantitative and qualitative research techniques, methods and approaches to address psychosocial risk assessment and psychosocial support by midwives during antenatal care. An explanatory sequential design was used. The methodology was aimed at accommodating the diverse population involved in the study, the nature of data being sought and the number of investigations conducted. A fully mixed research approach was implemented interactively through all the stages of the study. The study took place in six phases to meet the purpose of this research. Phase 1 entailed quantitative data collection and analysis; phase 2 qualitative data collection and analysis; phase 3 report writing; phase 4 formulation of guidelines; phase 5 pilot test; phase 6 integration of results and findings, and writing of final report.

Psychosocial risk assessment by midwives during antenatal care: a focus on psychosocial support

Traffic accidents (TA) are a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Psychological risk factors, whether traits or states, are important predictors of dangerous driving and of TA. However, educational and awareness campaigns often have little impact on such factors since they do not provide social resistance skills or cognitive restructuring, to change cognitive distortions which may underlie such factors. This research tested the effects of psychological inoculation (PI), a cognitive method that challenges and modifies cognitive distortions and teaches social resistance skills, on road hostility tendencies, using an indirect measure (Studies 1 and 2), and on simulated driving (Study 3). We preliminarily validated an indirect measure of road hostility tendencies, using a semi-projective test, not relying on interpretation or self-report. In Study 1, 59 Belgian students were assessed for indirect road hostility tendencies, before and immediately after PI or an awareness control. Indirect road hostility tendencies significantly decreased only in the PI group. In Study 2, 59 Israeli police cadets received PI or driving safety education (control) in groups. Levels of road hostility tendencies were significantly lower in the PI group than in controls, only immediately after the intervention, but not two weeks later. In Study 3, 40 male students were observed for brief PC-based simulated driving with social pressure, before and after PI or safety education (control). Only PI led to reduced accidents and touching/passing sidewalks from pre- to post-intervention. These relatively consistent results support the effectiveness of PI for reducing road hostility tendencies and accidents in simulated driving. Future studies need to test the long-term impact of PI on actual driving behavior. The ease of administering PI en-masse and its effects on road hostility tendencies and on simulated driving behavior may have important implications for accident prevention.

Georgeta Preda

Papers

A review of mental models research in child-computer interaction

Psychological risk factors for road safety