This article reports on an exploratory study aimed to identify which ways of marking required and optional fields help older people fill in web forms correctly. Drawing on a pilot study and selective attention research in ageing, modified versions of widely used forms were created, in which standard asterisks were replaced with one of three…

This report describes an in-depth analysis of the errors made by users of SOLO, a programming language written for Open University students studying cognitive psychology. The study was designed to (1) determine the effectiveness of SOLO's current error-handling routines by evaluating how often SOLO produced "sensible" messages or…

Considers cultural diversity in Web design and traces the design processes involved in the development of an online learning environment for indigenous Australian learners entering university. Highlights include culture, constructivist learning and situated cognition; cultural pluralism in instructional design; and ten design principles for…

Describes a process-tracing study which investigated study approaches adopted by four distance learners enrolled in the Bachelor of Education Program at James Cook University and their mental processes when learning from distance-teaching materials in order to identify textual features which activated mental processes for use in textual design.…

In this paper, we suggest that case-based resources, which are used for assisting cognition during problem solving, can be structured around the work of narratives in social cultural psychology. Theories and other research methods have proposed structures within narratives and stories which may be useful to the design of case-based resources.…