A Study of Secondary Students' Decision-Making Processes with Respect to Information Use, Particularly Students' Judgements of Relevance and Reliability.
This report details an ongoing investigation of the decision-making processes of a group of secondary school students in south-eastern Australia undertaking information search tasks. The study is situated in the field of information seeking and use, and, more broadly, in decision making. Research questions focus on students’ decisions about the relevance and reliability of information. Data collected include video screen captures, think-aloud reports, and interviews. Qualitative data analysis developed a preliminary grounded theory to describe decision-making processes. Students depended on system-provided relevance cues, rejected particular resource categories, examined remaining items for general and specific relevance, and primarily used a process of corroboration to assess reliability. Selected implications for educators are raised.
Two-choice response times are a common type of data, and much research has been devoted to the development of process models for such data. However, the practical application of these models is notoriously complicated, and flexible methods are largely nonexistent. We combine a popular model for choice response times—the Wiener diffusion process—with techniques from psychometrics in order to construct a hierarchical diffusion model. Chief among these techniques is the application of random effects, with which we allow for unexplained variability among participants, items, or other experimental units. These techniques lead to a modeling framework that is highly flexible and easy to work with. Among the many novel models this statistical framework provides are a multilevel diffusion model, regression diffusion models, and a large family of explanatory diffusion models. We provide examples and the necessary computer code.