Jason R. Finley

Comparing faculty information seeking in teaching and research: Implications for the design of digital libraries

ADEPT is a 5-year project whose goals are to develop, deploy, and evaluate inquiry learning capabilities for the Alexandria Digital Library, an extant digital library of primary sources in geography. We interviewed nine geography faculty members who teach undergraduate courses about their information seeking for research and teaching and their use of information resources in teaching. These data were supplemented by interviews with four faculty members from another ADEPT study about the nature of knowledge in geography. Among our key findings are that geography faculty are more likely to encounter useful teaching resources while seeking research resources than vice versa, although the influence goes in both directions. Their greatest information needs are for research data, maps, and images. They desire better searching by concept or theme, in addition to searching by location and place name. They make extensive use of their own research resources in their teaching. Among the implications for functionality and architecture of geographic digital libraries for educational use are that personal digital libraries are essential, because individual faculty members have personalized approaches to selecting, collecting, and organizing teaching resources. Digital library services for research and teaching should include the ability to import content from common office software and to store content in standard formats that can be exported to other applications. Digital library services can facilitate sharing among faculty but cannot overcome barriers such as intellectual property rights, access to proprietary research data, or the desire of individuals to maintain control over their own resources. Faculty use of primary and secondary resources needs to be better understood if we are to design successful digital libraries for research and teaching.

Metacognition of the testing effect: guiding learners to predict the benefits of retrieval.

If the mnemonic benefits of testing are to be widely realized in real-world learning circumstances, people must appreciate the value of testing and choose to utilize testing during self-guided learning. Yet metacognitive judgments do not appear to reflect the enhancement provided by testing Karpicke & Roediger (Science 319:966–968, 2008). In this article, we show that under judicious conditions, learners can indeed reveal an understanding of the beneficial effects of testing, as well as the interaction of that effect with delay (Experiment 1). In that experiment, subjects made judgments of learning (JOLs) for previously studied or previously tested items in either a cue-only or a cue–target context, and either immediately or after a 1-day delay. When subjects made judgments in a cue-only context, their JOLs accurately reflected the effects of testing, both immediately and at a delay. To evaluate the potential of exposure to such conditions for promoting generalized appreciation of testing effects, three further experiments elicited global predictions about restudied and tested items across two study/test cycles (Experiments 2, 3, and 4). The results indicated that learners’ global naïve metacognitive beliefs increasingly reflect the beneficial effects of testing when learners experience these benefits with increasing external support. If queried under facilitative circumstances, learners appreciate the mnemonic enhancement that testing provides on both an item-by-item and global basis but generalize that knowledge to future learning only with considerable guidance.

Metacognitive Control of Learning and Remembering

This chapter reviews research on the role of metacognition in self-directed learning, with a particular emphasis on metacognitive control. Learners can regulate their study experience to enhance learning by self-pacing study effectively, devising efficient study schedules, judiciously selecting items for study and re-study, strategically making use of self-testing strategies, accommodating study to anticipated test conditions, and using successful retrieval strategies. We review research that reveals how learners use these strategies in simple laboratory tasks and that suggests how such metacognitive skills can be improved through instruction or experience. We end by addressing the supportive role that information technology can play in the processes by which metacognition influences learning and memory.

How geography professors select materials for classroom lectures: implications for the design of digital libraries

A goal of the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype (ADEPT) project is to make primary resources in geography useful for undergraduate instruction in ways that promote inquiry learning. The ADEPT education and evaluation team interviewed professors about their use of geography information as they prepare for class lectures, as compared to their research activities. We found that professors desired the ability to search by concept (erosion, continental drift, etc.) as well as geographic location, and that personal research collections were an important source of instructional materials. Resources in geospatial digital libraries are typically described by location, but are rarely described by concept or educational application. This paper presents implications for the design of an educational digital library from our observations of the lecture preparation process. Findings include functionality requirements for digital libraries and implications for the notion of digital libraries as a shared information environment. The functional requirements include definitions and enhancements of searching capabilities, the ability to contribute and to share personal collections of resources, and the capability to manipulate data and images.

Metacognition of multitasking: How well do we predict the costs of divided attention?

Risky multitasking, such as texting while driving, may occur because people misestimate the costs of divided attention. In two experiments, participants performed a computerized visual-manual tracking task in which they attempted to keep a mouse cursor within a small target that moved erratically around a circular track. They then separately performed an auditory n-back task. After practicing both tasks separately, participants received feedback on their single-task tracking performance and predicted their dual-task tracking performance before finally performing the 2 tasks simultaneously. Most participants correctly predicted reductions in tracking performance under dual-task conditions, with a majority overestimating the costs of dual-tasking. However, the between-subjects correlation between predicted and actual performance decrements was near 0. This combination of results suggests that people do anticipate costs of multitasking, but have little metacognitive insight on the extent to which they are personally vulnerable to the risks of divided attention, relative to other people.

The effects of end-of-day picture review and a sensor-based picture capture procedure on autobiographical memory using SenseCam

Emerging “life-logging” technologies have tremendous potential to augment human autobiographical memory by recording and processing vast amounts of information from an individuals experiences. In this experiment undergraduate participants wore a SenseCam, a small, sensor-equipped digital camera, as they went about their normal daily activities for five consecutive days. Pictures were captured either at fixed intervals or as triggered by SenseCams sensors. On two of five nights, participants watched an end-of-day review of a random subset of pictures captured that day. Participants were tested with a variety of memory measures at intervals of 1, 3, and 8 weeks. The most fruitful of six measures were recognition rating (on a 1–7 scale) and picture-cued recall length. On these tests, end-of-day review enhanced performance relative to no review, while pictures triggered by SenseCams sensors showed little difference in performance compared to those taken at fixed time intervals. We discuss the promise of SenseCam as a tool for research and for improving autobiographical memory.

The Relationship between El Niño and the Duration and Frequency of the Santa Ana Winds of Southern California

Abstract This study examines the variability of the duration and frequency of Santa Ana winds due to El Niño over a thirty-three-year period. Daily Weather Maps and NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis were used to study large-scale upper-level and surface circulation patterns during wind events. A Students t-test was used to determine statistically significant changes in the winds during March of El Niño winters. A significant decrease in the duration and frequency of wind events was found in March during El Niño. This can be attributed to the decrease in strength and frequency of the Great Basin high pressure and the increase in wintertime cyclones in southern California.

Extending Cognition to External Agents

Sparrow and Chatman ask if extending social cognition in the Internet age is “the same as it ever was” or whether, due to Google and other search engines on the Internet, something fundamentally different has occurred in the past 20 years. They make many interesting points, but the bottom line is that it is probably too soon to answer the question. The Internet is relatively new, and not much research has been done to address the questions they cogently raise. These are still early days. Their article provides a useful summary of some of what is known on the topic. Humans have tried to offload memory tasks for as long as we have recorded history; in fact, such offloading is why we have the records of history. The ancient Greeks developed and perfected mnemonic systems, techniques for individuals to encode, store, and retrieve large amounts of information (Yates, 1966). Of course, some people were better at this than others. The institution of the mnemon arose, a person whose job it was to remember vast amounts of information concerning religious or legal information and who could be called upon to recite relevant laws or rules when decisions needed to be made (Le Goff, 1949/1992). In ancient Rome, slaves trained in the art of memory were called graeculi (“little Greeks”), and their job was to remember information about social and legal issues and thus help their masters when they needed information during debates or speeches (Schönpflug & Esser, 1995). This kind of externalization in both cases relies on having a few individuals charged with remembering the rules and history of a people (Danziger, 2008). On a different front, ancient Peruvians developed a system of knots tied in cords, quipus (or khipus), to provide an external memory aid for their history and bureaucracy (Tylor, 1870, pp. 156–160). A single quipu consisted of knots tied on a series of small cords attached to one large cord. Different types of knots could represent numerical values, and the order and color of the small cords could represent different categories of objects (e.g., types of livestock in a herd or types of soldiers in an army). This kind of mnemonic technique is partly independent of the group of rememberers, but as in the Greek and Roman traditions of the mnemon and graeculi, a person with extraordinary knowledge was needed to interpret the quipus. The quipus could not function as a book of history would, but rather they provided a set of retrieval cues from which a trained individual could reconstruct the recorded information (Rowlands, 1999). The point of these tales is that the externalization of memory is not new—humans strove for that long before the printing press, much less the Internet. The issue is how the Internet has accelerated and changed the process. That is the critical issue that Sparrow and Chatman address. Of the myriad issues considered in their target article, we focus on two in the remainder of our commentary. In the first section, we discuss the need for research on memory to expand its methods, frameworks, and theories to include external memory storage as a fundamental element of human memory systems. We expand on Sparrow and Chatman’s discussion of the Internet as a transactive memory agent by highlighting several approaches, from psychology and other disciplines, to the study of external memory storage as an extension of the human mind. In the second section, we focus on the role of retrieval in problem solving to highlight the need for continued use of internal memory as a core element of successful higher order cognitive function. We argue that although external memory can and should be a complement to internal memory processes, it is not always a viable alternative to internal memory. Rather, internally stored knowledge is often a prerequisite for optimal cognitive functioning. For a simple example, in order to successfully use Google, one must remember how to operate a computer, locate Google, and determine the key words that will lead to the best search for the missing information.

UCLA AstroBiology Society: The First Student-Run Astrobiology Organization

249 T HE UCLA ASTROBIOLOGY SOCIETY (ABS) was founded in 1999 as the first student organization devoted exclusively to astrobiology. Our group is co-sponsored by the UCLA branch of the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) and the Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life. ABS endeavors to unify undergraduates, grad