Undergraduate Research (UR) is a high-impact practice that results in positive outcomes for participants, such as improved academic skills and intellectual development as well as higher graduation rates and graduate school attendance. This research project compares the UR participation patterns of students with learning disabilities (LD) and their…

In this thesis, we hypothesize that data visualization users are subject to systematic errors, or cognitive biases, in decision-making under uncertainty. Based on research from psychology, behavioral economics, and cognitive science, we design five experiments to measure the role of anchoring bias, confirmation bias, belief bias, and myopic loss…

In the age of big data, interactive data visualizations are becoming increasingly prevalent. The ability to focus on subsets of data is essential for exploring large temporal, geospatial, topical, and network datasets. In order to categorize all parts of data visualizations, various attempts have been made to build frameworks for how to interpret,…

Because data access may be perceived by principals as overwhelming or irrelevant rather than helpful (Wayman, Spikes, & Volonnino, 2013), data access does not guarantee effective data use. The data-based decision making literature has largely focused on teacher use of data, considering less often data-based organizational improvements for the…

I begin by introducing Virtual Design Apprenticeship (VDA), a learning model--built on a solid foundation of education principles and theories--that promotes learning of design skills via overlay design tools. In VDA, when an individual needs to learn a new design skill or paradigm she is provided accessible, concrete examples that have been…

A large number of educational resources is now made available on the Web to support both regular classroom learning and online learning. However, the abundance of available content produced at least two problems: how to help students to find the most appropriate resources and how to engage them into using these resources and benefit from them.…

This study investigates the relationships between the use of a zoom tool, the terms they supply to describe the image, and the type of image being viewed. Participants were assigned to two groups, one with access to the tool and one without, and were asked to supply terms to describe forty images, divided into four categories: landscape, portrait,…

Understanding the user and customizing the interface to augment cognition and usability are goals of human computer interaction research and design. Yet, little is known about the influence of individual visual-verbal information presentation preferences on visual navigation and screen element usage. If consistent differences in visual navigation…