The need to educate a competitive workforce is a global problem. In the US, for example, despite billions of dollars spent to improve the educational system, approximately 35% of students never finish high school. The drop rate among some demographic groups is as high as 50-60%. At the college level in the US only 30% of students graduate from…

Introduces navigation as a central concept for information retrieval and for information systems in general. The evolution of information systems is described; navigability as an aid to improve relevance is discussed; and a system under development that attempts to facilitate navigation for information retrieval is described. (31 references) (LRW)

The Telemakus System builds on the areas of concept representation, schema theory, and information visualization to enhance knowledge discovery from scientific literature. This article describes the underlying theories and an overview of a working implementation designed to enhance the knowledge discovery process through retrieval, visual and…

It has been recognized that in order to drive Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) into mainstream use by the teaching community, it is essential to support teachers through the entire ITS process: Design, Development, Deployment, Reflection and Adaptation. Although research has been done on supporting teachers through design to deployment of ITSs,…

WQ is a Web-based system that reflects some of the ideas found in WebQuests. This paper analyzes the characteristics that make the WebQuests so popular and determines which of their components give them the greatest educational value. The WQ system, which the authors have implemented, presents sites to be browsed and searched. It allows students…

This paper outlines work on a class of systems called Personal Information Management Assistants (PIMAs). PIMAs observe user interaction with everyday applications and use these observations to anticipate a user's information needs. They then automatically fulfill these needs by accessing Internet information sources, filtering the results, and…

Describes a study of users' document selection behavior that was conducted to build a tentative cognitive model of document selection behavior to be used in designing intelligent information retrieval systems. Topics addressed include studies of relevance and of decision making; value judgments; and document information elements considered during…

Proposes a useful concept of relevance as a relationship and an effect on the movement of a user through the iterative stages of their information seeking process, and that users' relevance judgments can be plotted on a Three-Dimensional Spatial Model of Relevance Level, Degree and Time. Discusses implications for the development of information…

The growing volume of heterogeneous and distributed information on the World Wide Web has made it increasingly difficult for existing tools to retrieve relevant information. To improve the performance of these tools, this paper suggests how to handle two aspects of the problem. The first aspect concerns a better representation and description of…

Increasingly, digital libraries are being defined as collection pointers to World Wide Web-based resources rather than collections that hold the resources themselves. Maintaining these collections is challenging due to distributed document ownership and high fluidity. Typically a collection's maintainer has to assess the relevance of changes with…

Proposes principles for the design of effective document retrieval (DR) systems incorporating users' cognitive behaviors. Addresses three issues: (1) effective representations for documents to enable users' relevance judgments and decision making; (2) efficient presentations of documents to facilitate users' information processing and decision…

This paper proposes a learning based method that can automatically determine how likely a student is to give a correct answer to a problem in an intelligent tutoring system. Only log files that record students' actions with the system are used to train the model, therefore the modeling process doesn't require expert knowledge for identifying…

E-Referencer is an expert intermediary system for searching library online public access catalogs (OPACs) on the World Wide Web. It is implemented as a proxy server that mediates the interaction between the user and Boolean OPACs. It transforms a Boolean OPAC into a retrieval system with many of the search capabilities of Web search engines.…

The ability to predict a student's performance could be useful in a great number of different ways associated with university-level learning. In this paper, a grammar guided genetic programming algorithm, G3P-MI, has been applied to predict if the student will fail or pass a certain course and identifies activities to promote learning in a…

A multimedia encyclopedia (MME) demonstration disk has been developed by the Microsoft Corporation, which contains five-page articles on 12 subjects. Each article contains text, images, audio, and in some cases, animation and full motion digital images. Each MME article is constructed as a network of linked text, image, and sound files. With mouse…