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
TL;DR: 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.
Abstract: 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.
Citations
More filters
01 Apr 2019
53 citations
02 May 2019
TL;DR: It was found that children's fear reactions emphasized physical harm and threats to their relationships (particularly with attachment figures) and developers can build systems that are more transparent about the risks they produce and more sensitive to the fears they may unintentionally raise by treating these concerns as principal design considerations.
Abstract: In HCI, adult concerns about technologies for children have been studied extensively. However, less is known about what children themselves find concerning in everyday technologies. We examine children's technology-related fears by probing their use of the colloquial term "creepy." To understand children's perceptions of "creepy technologies," we conducted four participatory design sessions with children (ages 7 - 11) to design and evaluate creepy technologies, followed by interviews with the same children. We found that children's fear reactions emphasized physical harm and threats to their relationships (particularly with attachment figures). The creepy signals from technology the children described include: deception, lack of control, mimicry, ominous physical appearance, and unpredictability. Children acknowledged trusted adults will mediate the relationship between creepy technology signals and fear responses. Our work contributes a close examination of what children mean when they say a technology is "creepy." By treating these concerns as principal design considerations, developers can build systems that are more transparent about the risks they produce and more sensitive to the fears they may unintentionally raise.
52 citations
41 citations
07 Jul 2020
TL;DR: This paper explores the users' mental models of RS and identifies a general structure underlying all of these models, consisting of four steps: data acquisition, inference of user profile, comparison of user profiles or items, and generation of recommendations.
Abstract: While online content is personalized to an increasing degree, eg. using recommender systems (RS), the rationale behind personalization and how users can adjust it typically remains opaque. This was often observed to have negative effects on the user experience and perceived quality of RS. As a result, research increasingly has taken user-centric aspects such as transparency and control of a RS into account, when assessing its quality. However, we argue that too little of this research has investigated the users' perception and understanding of RS in their entirety. In this paper, we explore the users' mental models of RS. More specifically, we followed the qualitative grounded theory methodology and conducted 10 semi-structured face-to-face interviews with typical and regular Netflix users. During interviews participants expressed high levels of uncertainty and confusion about the RS in Netflix. Consequently, we found a broad range of different mental models. Nevertheless, we also identified a general structure underlying all of these models, consisting of four steps: data acquisition, inference of user profile, comparison of user profiles or items, and generation of recommendations. Based on our findings, we discuss implications to design more transparent, controllable, and user friendly RS in the future.
28 citations
Cites background from "There’s a creepy guy on the other e..."
...[14] elicited different mental models that middle school students create of the Google search engine....
[...]
09 Sep 2017
TL;DR: Building on Piaget’s theories, Johnson (2002) and Langley (1995) study order effects in incremental learning and find that the order in which material is consumed has a significant influence on the overall learning rate and absolute knowledge retention.
Abstract: The Internet connects vast knowledge resources that are assumed to contain the necessary information to answer most general questions (Kräenbring et al. 2014; Reavley et al. 2012). However, even given this seemingly inexhaustible well of information, the act of learning from it consists of more than just looking-up and memorizing facts. Constructivist theoreticians including Piaget and Vygotsky argue that the learning process necessarily depends on the context of existing knowledge upon which the newly encountered factoids are built. The stronger the contextualization of new knowledge, the more effortless and effective learning is assumed to be. Jean Piaget first proposed the theory of ‘‘Cognitive Development’’ that considers knowledge to be an actively constructed complex system of experience, stage of cognitive development, cultural background and personal history (Piaget 1976). In other words, knowledge is derived from personal experience and ideas rather than an aggregation of loose facts and formulas. Building on Piaget’s theories, Johnson (2002) and Langley (1995) study order effects in incremental learning. The authors find that the order in which material is consumed has a significant influence on the overall learning rate and absolute knowledge retention. Kuhlthau (1993) discusses the importance of mediators who enable learners to go beyond the current limits of their understanding. Despite the wide acceptance and demonstrated success of constructivist methods in pedagogics, common retrieval models do not explicitly manifest any notion of contextual learning. Document relevance is largely judged in isolation and list-wide ranking considerations rarely go beyond diversification efforts. Consequently, state-of-the-
19 citations
Cites background from "There’s a creepy guy on the other e..."
...[10] investigate the relationship between middle school students’ mental models of Google and their information seeking skills....
[...]
References
More filters
Book•
01 Jan 1969
4,944 citations
"There’s a creepy guy on the other e..." refers methods in this paper
...Intercoder reliability was then calculated using Scott’s Pi formula (Holsti 1969), yielding a figure of 88%....
[...]
TL;DR: A comparative examination of the models of adaptive behavior employed in psychology and economics shows that in almost all respects the latter postulate a much greater complexity in the choice mechanisms, and a much larger capacity in the organism for obtaining information and performing computations than do the former.
Abstract: A growing interest in decision making in psychology is evidenced by the recent publication of Edwards’ review article in the Psychological Bulletin (1) and the Santa Monica Conference volume, Decision Processes (7). In this work, much attention has been focused on the characterization of rational choice, and because the latter topic has been a central concern in economics, the theory of decision making has become a natural meeting ground for psychological and economic theory. A comparative examination of the models of adaptive behavior employed in psychology (e.g., learning theories), and of the models of rational behavior employed in economics, shows that in almost all respects the latter postulate a much greater complexity in the choice mechanisms, and a much larger capacity in the organism for obtaining information and performing computations, than do the former. Moreover, in the limited range of situations where the predictions of the two theories have been compared (see [7, Ch. 9, 10, 18]), the learning theories appear to account for the observed behavior rather better than do the theories of rational behavior. Both from these scanty data and from an examination of the postulates of the economic models it appears probable that, however adaptive the behavior of organisms in learning and choice situations, this adaptiveness falls far short of the ideal of “maximizing” postulated in economic theory. Evidently, organisms adapt well enough to “satisfice”; they do not, in general, “optimize.” If this is the case, a great deal can be learned about rational decision making by taking into account, at the outset, the limitations upon the capacities and complexity of the organism, and by taking account of the fact that the environments to which it must adapt possess properties that permit further simplication of its choice mechanisms. It may be useful, therefore, to ask: How simple a set of choice mechanisms can we postulate and still obtain the gross features of observed adaptive choice behavior? In a previous paper (6) I have put forth some suggestions as to the kinds of “approximate” rationality that might be employed by an organism possessing limited information and limited computational facilities. The suggestions were “hypothetical” in that, lacking definitive knowledge of the human decisional processes, we can only conjecture on the basis of our everyday experiences, our introspection, and a very limited body of psychological literature what these
4,869 citations
"There’s a creepy guy on the other e..." refers background in this paper
...both bounded rationality (Simon 1956), which holds that people are rational within limits, often preferring to settle for a less optimal solution that is less costly to identify and enact (‘‘satisfice’’), and a person’s limited previous experience with a system (Doyle and Ford 1998)....
[...]
...These deficiencies have been posited to arise from both bounded rationality (Simon 1956), which holds that people are rational within limits, often preferring to settle for a less optimal solution that is less costly to identify and enact (‘‘satisfice’’), and a person’s limited previous experience…...
[...]
TL;DR: The authors showed that the positive test strategy can be a very good heuristic for determining the truth or falsity of a hypothesis under realistic conditions, but it can also lead to systematic errors or inefficiencies.
Abstract: Strategies for hypothesis testing in scientific investigation and everyday reasoning have interested both psychologists and philosophers. A number of these scholars stress the importance of disconfir. marion in reasoning and suggest that people are instead prone to a general deleterious "confirmation bias" In particula~ it is suggested that people tend to test those cases that have the best chance of verifying current beliefs rather than those that have the best chance of falsifying them. We show, howeve~ that many phenomena labeled "confirmation bias" are better understood in terms of a general positive test strate~. With this strategy, there is a tendency to test cases that are expected (or known) to have the property of interest rather than those expected (or known) to lack that property. This strategy is not equivalent to confirmation bias in the first sense; we show that the positive test strategy can be a very good heuristic for determining the truth or falsity of a hypothesis under realistic conditions~ It can, howeve~ lead to systematic errors or inefficiencies. The appropriateness of human hypotheses-testing strategies and prescriptions about optimal strategies must he understood in terms of the interaction between the strategy and the task at hand.
1,811 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors outline the goals of design research and how it is related to other methodologies, and provide guidelines for how design research can best be carried out in the future.
Abstract: The term "design experiments" was introduced in 1992, in articles by Ann Brown (1992) and Allan Collins (1992). Design experiments were developed as a way to carry out formative research to test and refine educational designs based on principles derived from prior research. More recently the term design research has been applied to this kind of work. In this article, we outline the goals of design research and how it is related to other methodologies. We illustrate how design research is carried out with two very different examples. And we provide guidelines for how design research can best be carried out in the future.
1,780 citations
"There’s a creepy guy on the other e..." refers methods in this paper
...The program was implemented with the assistance of a grant from the National Library of Medicine to use design-based research (an approach in which researchers co-design learning programs with educators (Collins et al. 2004) to create...
[...]
...…from the National Library of Medicine to use design-based research (an approach in which researchers co-design learning programs with educators (Collins et al. 2004) to create lessons and modules for school librarians to use in collaboration with science and health teachers in both the…...
[...]