Sacide Güzin Mazman

A Cross Cultural Perspective on Information Communication Technologies Learning Survey

Information behavior has been at the core of researchers’ interest for a long time. According to researches attention in the field of information research has shifted over the years from a dominant interest in the use of channels and sources to an emphasis on the encountering and seeking of information and the interpretation of meaning from that information. However, measuring this disposition to seek and its related skills is a challenge. In this study, the Information Seeking StrategiesScale was adapted to the Turkish language. The results indicated that (a) the scale could be used in Turkish settings by removing two items, (b) ICT tools are employed for information seeking rather than information sharing by Turkish college students who participated in this study, and (c) no gender or grade differences were observed. Further recommendations are discussed.

Individual Differences in Different Level Mental Rotation Tasks: An Eye Movement Study

The purpose of this exploratory study was to probe the cognitive processes of undergraduate students at varying mental rotation ability (MRA) levels during mental rotation tasks. The study group consisted of 14 undergraduate students from the Psychological Counseling and Guidance Department and Computer Education and Instructional Technologies Department at Hacettepe University. Firstly, participants’ mental rotation ability levels were determined. Secondly, participants were grouped according to their mental rotation test scores. Then, they were given two digital tangram problems with different difficulty levels. During their interaction with Tangram problems, their eye movements were recorded. The Mann Whitney U test was run to compare differences in eye movements across different mental rotation ability level groups. As a result, it was found that while there were significant differences in eye movement metrics between different mental rotation ability levels for the easy tangram problem, there were no significant differences observed in eye movement metrics for the difficult tangram problem. In addition, examining completion time showed that while easy tangram problem completion time was significantly shorter for people with a higher score on the mental rotation test, there were no significant differences between completion times of different level mental rotation ability groups when solving the difficult tangram problem. Since the spatial ability is an important predictor of task performance and completion time, it is suggested that adaptive learning environments should be designed to compensate for low MRA level learners.

Identifying latent patterns in undergraduate Students’ programming profiles

This study aims to explore and reveal profiling patterns in the measurement of cognitive and noncognitivecharacteristics of undergraduate students’ programming performances. Spatial skills, workingmemory, perceived programming self-efficacy, mathematics scores, and academic grade point averagescores were taken indicative variables to be explored. Participants of the study are 100 undergraduatestudents registered to the Programming-I course at two different universities. The data were analyzedthrough multi-dimensional profile analysis. The result of the multidimensional scaling analysis indicated twodifferent profiles for the two groups: high and low programming performance groups. For both groups,relationship between the most similar variables was found to be verbal memory, mathematics achievementand perceived programming self-efficacy. The results indicated that there was a relatively similarrelationship between visual-spatial memory and spatial orientation skills in the low-performance group,while mental rotation skill was significantly different than the other variables. It was noted that two profiles forhigh- and low-performance groups were quite different in terms of mental rotation skill. It was also found that spatial orientation, visual-spatial memory and mental rotation performances were all different from eachother, and from the other three variables in the group with high programming performance. The mostdefinitive variables for low- and high-performance groups were self-efficacy, verbal memory andmathematics achievement. This study revealed that only verbal memory was the determinant variable inboth groups for working memory.