This study investigated the experiences of broadening (i.e., thinking and acting creatively and being open to exploring new ways of being) and narrowing (i.e., the experience of perceiving one's choices as limited) in the supervisory process with the aim of identifying key relational themes from the perspective of supervisees. We interviewed 10…

Library patrons familiar with Web searching conventions often find library searching to be less familiar and even intimidating. This article describes and evaluates a series of usability research studies employing two different and popular methodologies: user-centered redesign and usability testing. Card sorting and affinity mapping were used to…

While different approaches to evaluation will yield different results, depending on the purpose of the evaluation this article describes an evaluation approach that was aimed at investigation of the mental models of users of the programme. The study was driven by questions about the differences in mental models of the instructional designers and…

Recent research on annotation interfaces provides provocative evidence that anchored, annotation-based discussion environments may lead to better conversations about a text. However, annotation interfaces raise complicated tradeoffs regarding screen real estate and positioning. It is argued that solving this screen real estate problem requires…

A framework is proposed in which on-line activities occurring during comprehension are explicitly tied to the memory representation of a story. The framework, referred to as the "landscape" framework, is used to implement a process model that assumes that readers attempt to explain story events in terms of their causal antecedents. An…

A study examined the effect of word processing on the amount and kind of planning writers do. Subjects, 10 experienced writers and 10 student writers, wrote essays with pen and paper, word processing alone, and a combination of word processing and pen and paper. All students were experienced with computers. The subjects' think-aloud protocols and…

Contains (1) A Comment on "Protocols, Retrospective Reports, and the Stream of Consciousness" (Victor J. Vitanza); (2) "Erwin R. Steinberg Responds"; (3) A Comment on "Intertextuality and the Cultural Text in Recent Semiotics" (Stephen Kogan); and (4) Two Comments on "College English" (Kenneth E. Eble, Jean…

This article suggests an alternative valuation approach and method based on "phenomenology" or "personal constructs" in the evaluation of management training. The approach is that learning and its application depend, not on the direct influence of externally located objects, but on how the learner experiences and evaluates…

This paper examines the role of scaffolding in the process of abstraction. An activity-theoretic approach to abstraction in context is taken. This examination is carried out with reference to verbal protocols of two 17 year-old students working together on a task connected to sketching the graph of |f|x|)|. Examination of the data suggests that…

Examines the ability of children to evaluate their comprehension of text using lexical, external, and internal consistency standards. Finds that children more often use lexical and external consistency than internal consistency and that the results of verbal report measures are inconsistent with performance measures. (RS)

Describes the use of think-aloud protocols to reflect writing processes and to examine the dynamics of group writing conferences in a writing group consisting of five undergraduate, preservice elementary teachers and their professor. (SR)

Examining self-reported verbal protocols and online measures of spelling latencies for 93 elementary school students showed that children seem to use a relatively sequential read-out from long-term memory when directly retrieving a spelling, but they use a consonant pair strategy for final consonant clusters when spelling out a word. (SLD)

States that although the think-aloud method (TAM) is being used with increasing frequency in studying text comprehension, some skepticism of its value remains. Discusses assumptions behind TAM, aspects of comprehension it can reveal, and directions for research using TAM. Argues that TAM is a useful technique for tracking changes in the contents…

This brief article analyzes verbal protocols--oral records of thought provided by subjects when thinking aloud during or immediately after completing a task. (Author/VWL)

Describes verbal protocols as a useful tool for evaluating computer hardware and software, especially if informed by activity theory. Such protocols cannot, however, stand alone in a thorough evaluation design. (Author/SLD)