The present research investigated whether immediate metacognitive feedback on students’ help-seeking errors can help students acquire better help-seeking skills. The Help Tutor, an intelligent tutor agent for help seeking, was integrated into a commercial tutoring system for geometry, the Geometry Cognitive Tutor. Study 1, with 58 students, found that the real-time assessment of students’ help-...

In order to design better search experiences, we need to understand the complexities of human information-seeking behaviour. In this paper, we propose a model of information behavior based on the needs of users of consumer-oriented websites and search applications. The model consists of a set of search modes that that users employ to satisfy their information search and discovery goals. We pres...

Most animal species use distinctive courship patterns to choose among potential mates. Over time, the sensory signaling and preferences used during courtship can diverge among groups that are reproductively isolated. This divergence of signal traits and preferences is thought to be an important cause of behavioral isolation during the speciation process. Here, we examine the sensory modalities ...

BACKGROUND Health information exchanged between friends or family members can influence decision making, both for routine health questions and for serious health issues. A health information broker is a person to whom friends and family turn for advice or information on health-related topics. Characteristics and online behaviors of health information brokers have not previously been studied in ...

This paper reports the results of two empirical studies which explored the information seeking behaviour of engineering and law students in Ireland. Findings reveal similar patterns in the information seeking behaviour between students studying to become professionals and information seeking patterns of these groups identified in the Leckie et al. model. Students learned their information seeki...

Health Information Retrieval is the application of Information Retrieval concepts and techniques to the healthcare domain. Contextual Information Retrieval is a subarea of IR that incorporates context features in the search process towards its improvement. Both areas have been gaining interest from the research community but it’s not frequent to see the combination of both. The Ph.D. research p...

In this work, we study collective intelligence behavior of Web users that share and watch video content. We propose that the aggregated users’ video activity exhibits characteristic patterns that may be used in order to infer important video scenes thus leading to collective intelligence concerning the video content. In particular, we have utilised a controlled user experiment with information-...

Xuemei Ge is Metadata Librarian in Brown-Daniel Library at Tennessee State University; e-mail: xge@ tnstate.edu. © Xuemei Ge This article focuses on how electronic information resources influence the information-seeking process in the social sciences and humanities. It examines the information-seeking behavior of scholars in these fields, and extends the David Ellis model of information-seeking...

Numerous studies of engineers information seeking behavior have found that accessibility was the factor that influenced most their selection of information sources. The concept of accessibility, however, is ambiguous and was given various interpretations by both researchers and engineers. Detailed interviews with 32 engineers, in which they described incidents of personal information seeking in...

The Internet has become a popular source of health information. However, in-depth understanding of the information seeking behaviour of online health information is limited. We conducted an experiment to investigate the information needs and behaviours of health information seekers. This paper reports on a model of behavioural patterns drawn on the experimental results, and implications for des...