Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) present ways for human users to work together on a task. Research efforts of CVEs have mainly focused on the factors that affect the task performance of the users, such as awareness, communication, and presence. Furthermore, the users involved normally have the same task experience or knowledge background. In this paper, we examined the effect of intera...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The modified Rankin Scale is widely used to assess changes in activity and lifestyle after stroke, but it has been criticized for its subjectivity. The purpose of the present study was to compare conventional assessment on the modified Rankin Scale with assessment through a structured interview. METHODS Sixty-three patients with stroke 6 to 24 months previously were int...

OBJECTIVE To examine the reliability of the Assessment of Capacity for Myoelectric Control (ACMC) in children and adults with a myoelectric prosthetic hand. DESIGN Intra-rater and inter-rater reliability estimated from reported assessments by 3 different raters. PATIENTS A sample of convenience of 26 subjects (11 males, 15 females) with upper limb reduction deficiency or amputation and myoe...

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder-Fifth Edition explicitly requires that attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms should be apparent across settings, taking into account reports from multiple informants. Yet, it provides no guidelines how information from different raters should be combined in ADHD diagnosis. We examined the validity of different approache...

We present Wave menus, a variant of multi-stroke marking menus designed for improving the novice mode of marking while preserving their efficiency in the expert mode of marking. Focusing on the novice mode, a criteria-based analysis of existing marking menus motivates the design of Wave menus. Moreover a user experiment is presented that compares four hierarchical marking menus in novice mode. ...

BACKGROUND/AIMS CIBIC plus-J is the Japanese language version equivalent to CIBIC plus. Variability of CIBIC plus-J arises among raters in accordance with their experience and their memories of patients' conditions at baseline. Therefore, in a multicenter trial of Alzheimer's disease, CIBIC plus-J interviews with Alzheimer's disease patients were videotaped, and the tapes were assessed by centr...

Single and multiple ratings of test items have become a stock component of standardized educational tests and surveys. For both formative and summative evaluation of raters, a number of multiple-read rating designs are now commonplace (Wilson and Hoskens, 1999), including designs with as many as six raters per item (e.g. Sykes, Heidorn and Lee, 1999). As digital image based distributed rating b...

OBJECTIVES Manual platelet estimation is one of the methods used when automated platelet estimates are very low. However, the reproducibility of manual platelet estimation has not been adequately studied. We sought to assess the reproducibility of manual platelet estimation following automated low platelet counts and to evaluate the impact of the level of experience of the person counting on th...

BACKGROUND Inter-rater agreement in the interpretation of chest X-ray (CXR) films is crucial for clinical and epidemiological studies of tuberculosis. We compared the readings of CXR films used for a survey of tuberculosis between raters from two Asian countries. METHODS Of the 11,624 people enrolled in a prevalence survey in Hanoi, Viet Nam, in 2003, we studied 258 individuals whose CXR film...

Writing assessments often make use of analytic rating scales to describe the criteria for different performance levels. However, the use of such rating scales requires a level of interpretation by raters and if several raters are involved, the reliability of examinee scores can be significantly affected (Engelhard, 1992; McNamara 1996). Variability between raters is partly managed by rater trai...