Media Research Center

About: Media Research Center is a based out in . It is known for research contribution in the topics: Collaborative learning & Educational technology. The organization has 491 authors who have published 950 publications receiving 28581 citations. The organization is also known as: MRC.

Reading science texts online

Abstract: The present study investigated the influence of the source of information on high-school students' identification of contradictions within online science texts. A pilot study with N?=?92 high-school students showed that their expectations regarding the quality of an online text differed significantly depending on the type of the source (i.e., on the authoritativeness of the website and the author's expertise). In the main study N?=?161 high-school students read a science text that contained four text-internal contradictions and that varied regarding the authoritativeness of the website on which the text was presented (authoritative vs. non-authoritative website) and the author of the text (expert vs. layperson). After reading, a Conflict Verification Task (CVT) was applied to measure students' identification of the conflicting information. The results indicate that students' identification of contradictions differs as a function of website authoritativeness and author expertise. Both in a text stemming from an unambiguously authoritative source ("expert author/authoritative website") and in a text stemming from an unambiguously non-authoritative source ("lay author/non-authoritative website") students identified more contradictions than in a text stemming from a source whose authoritativeness is ambiguous ("lay author/authoritative website" or "expert author/non-authoritative website"). Students' identification of contradictions in an online science text was examined.Influence of source type (type of website and author) of the text was examined.Source type influenced students' quality expectations of online texts.Source type influenced students' identification of contradictions.

Personal Experiences and Emotionality in Health-Related Knowledge Exchange in Internet Forums: A Randomized Controlled Field Experiment Comparing Responses to Facts Vs Personal Experiences

Abstract: Background: On the Internet, people share personal experiences as well as facts and objective information. This also holds true for the exchange of health-related information in a variety of Internet forums. In online discussions about health topics, both fact-oriented and strongly personal contributions occur on a regular basis. Objective: In this field experiment, we examined in what way the particular type of contribution (ie, factual information vs personal experiences) has an impact on the subsequent communication in health-related Internet forums. Methods: For this purpose, we posted parallelized queries to 28 comparable Internet forums; queries were identical with regard to the information contained but included either fact-oriented descriptions or personal experiences related to measles vaccination. In the factual information condition, we posted queries to the forums that contained the neutral summary of a scientific article. In the personal experiences condition, we posted queries to the forums that contained the same information as in the first condition, but were framed as personal experiences Results: We found no evidence that personal experiences evoked more responses (mean 3.79, SD 3.91) from other members of the Internet forums than fact-oriented contributions (mean 2.14, SD 2.93, t 26 =0.126, P =.219). But personal experiences elicited emotional replies (mean 3.17, SD 1.29) from other users to a greater extent than fact-oriented contributions (mean 2.13, SD 1.29, t 81 =3.659, P <.001). Conclusions: We suggest that personal experiences elicited more emotional replies due to the process of emotional anchoring of people’s own style of communication. We recommend future studies should aim at testing the hypotheses with more general and with less emotionally charged topics, constructing different fact-oriented posts, and examining additional potential factors of influence such as personality factors or particular communication situations. [J Med Internet Res 2014;16(12):e277]

The impact of exchange programs on the integration of the hostgroup into the self-concept

Abstract: Two studies analyzed the impact of international exchange programs on students' identity development. More precisely, the authors predict that exchange students integrate the host society (hostgroup) into their self-concept during an exchange year. Study 1 found a stronger social identification with the hostgroup and higher commitment for former exchange students than for future exchange students. Study 2 replicated the difference between former and future exchange students and found in addition that both former and future exchange students had a stronger identification and commitment in comparison to a control group that did neither take part in nor apply for an exchange program. Moreover, in this study the inclusion of the hostgroup into the self-concept was assessed via a response time paradigm. The results indicate that former and future exchange students have a stronger association between the self and the hostgroup than the control sample, but no difference between former and future exchange students was found. The results provide evidence for the impact of interest in and actual intensive intergroup contact on students' self-concept. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Weapons of Influence Misused: A Social Influence Analysis of Why People Fall Prey to Internet Scams

Abstract: Internet crime, including fraud and spread of malicious software, is a pervasive and costly global issue. Many of these crimes occur not because of technology failure but because of the human element. People can easily be manipulated through social engineering – the use of psychological tactics to influence individuals to assist in their own victimization. We employ a social influence framework, drawing upon ideas from Robert Cialdini, to understand the nature of social engineering techniques and why they are successful in exploiting unsuspecting individuals. Specifically, we discuss how social engineers misuse six pervasive weapons of influence – Liking, Authority, Scarcity, Social Proof, Reciprocity, and Commitment and Consistency – in order to effectively influence individuals to take the initial steps toward their exploitation. We conclude with a discussion of the precautions individuals can take to resist malicious influence attempts online.

Multimodal Engagement Analysis from Facial Videos in the Classroom

Abstract: Student engagement is a key component of learning and teaching, resulting in a plethora of automated methods to measure it. Whereas most of the literature explores student engagement analysis using computer-based learning often in the lab, we focus on using classroom instruction in authentic learning environments. We collected audiovisual recordings of secondary school classes over a one and a half month period, acquired continuous engagement labeling per student (N=15) in repeated sessions, and explored computer vision methods to classify engagement from facial videos. We learned deep embeddings for attentional and affective features by training Attention-Net for head pose estimation and Affect-Net for facial expression recognition using previously-collected large-scale datasets. We used these representations to train engagement classifiers on our data, in individual and multiple channel settings, considering temporal dependencies. The best performing engagement classifiers achieved student-independent AUCs of .620 and .720 for grades 8 and 12, respectively, with attention-based features outperforming affective features. Score-level fusion either improved the engagement classifiers or was on par with the best performing modality. We also investigated the effect of personalization and found that only 60 seconds of person-specific data, selected by margin uncertainty of the base classifier, yielded an average AUC improvement of .084.