Joel Stutz

Academic issues in MIS: journals and books

The range of journals in which to publish scholarly papers in the management information systems (MIS) field has expanded over the years. The perceived ranking of the journals by those in the field is an important issue to academics. Another question of importance to academic personnel in the MIS field is whether the writing of books counts toward tenure and promotion. This article presents the results of a survey relative to these two questions. It was conducted in late 1989 and early 1990 among MIS professors in AACSB accredited business schools, with about half of all such schools participating. The survey found that the most highly regarded journals for IS research include an assortment of IS-specific, computer science, and management science journals. This continues a long-standing tradition, despite the introduction of several new IS journals. IT also showed that books are generally counted toward tenure and promotion.

An empirical analysis of the computerization of interactive software evaluation systems

Abstract This research studies factor analysis of traditional survey- questionnaires for interactive software evaluation in order to construct a Principal Factor Conversion Function (PFCF). Such a PFCF may be used in several ways: first, for exploratory purposes, to discover the principal factors of the traditional questionnaire; second to test the potential of data reduction within significant loss of information; and third to compare the traditional manual evaluation to a condensed computerized interactive software evaluation. A CAI system was used as the software to be evaluated in this research.

The Effect of Music Listening, Personality, and Prior Knowledge on Mood and Work Performance of Systems Analysts

This research examined the effect of music use, personality and prior knowledge on mood and work performance of 62 Systems Analysts. Although the quality of the data modeling task did not appear to be affected by the experimental treatment of 10 minutes of music listening, the level of extraversion, modeling proficiency, and theoretical knowledge related to modeling showed significant effects. Nevertheless, the effects of music were demonstrated on several mood measures. The effect of music on negative and positive affect, along with their subscales, are presented. Finally, changes in the mood of participants who listened to the music are examined in the light of various demographic and personality variables.

The Learning Curve: Computer Assisted Instruction and Programming

The present study evaluates the learning curve of students who are learning to program in BASIC via classroom instruction supplemented by the use of Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI) software tutorials. This study identifies the “difficult to understand” areas. It concludes that some topics are significantly more difficult to understand as compared to other topics. It further appears that as the level of topic difficulty increases, the additional complexity offsets the effects of the learning phenomena, leading to a slower pace of learning more advanced topics. The understanding of such problems may be helpful for system resources planning and control.