Active Reading is an important part of a knowledge worker’s activities; it involves highlighting, writing notes, marking with symbols, etc., on a document. Many Active Reading applications have been designed in seeking to replicate the affordances of paper through digital-ink-based annotation tools. However, these applications require users to perform numerous steps to use various types of annotation tools, which impose an unnecessary cognitive load, distracting them from their reading tasks. In this thesis, we introduce GestAnnot, an Active Reading application for tablet computers that takes a fundamentally different approach of incorporating multi-touch gesture techniques for creating and manipulating annotations on an e-document, thus offering a flexible and easy- to-use annotation solution. Based on the literature review, we designed and developed GestAnnot and then performed lab and field evaluations of the software. In lab evaluation, GestAnnot performed better than one of the best existing annotation application in many aspects, including number of steps. The design was then refined based on the feedback received. The field evaluation of the improved design helped us to understand the performance of the application in the real world. We proposed a set of design guidelines through the feedback received from both evaluations, which any future Active Reading application could benefit from.

A utilização de ferramentas digitais mudou a forma como interagimos com o texto escrito. A leitura ativa, em particular, onde um leitor crítico busca no texto elementos para a satisfação de hipóteses, exige que as interfaces digitais de acesso e manipulação de material textual permitam a expressão adequada dos processos cognitivos envolvidos no ato de leitura. Para realizar a leitura ativa, entretanto, o usuário depende de mecanismos intuitivos de anotação. Nesse contexto, esse trabalho apresenta uma proposta de métricas para a determinação da utilidade de uma taxonomia de anotações e para seu ajuste. / The use of digital tools changed the way we interact with written text. In particular, the active reading, where a critical reader searches the text for elements to satisfy her hypothesis, demands fromdigital interfaces to allowthe adequate expression of cognitive processes involved in the act of reading. To perform active reading, however, the user depends on intuitive annotation mechanisms. In this context, This work presents a proposal for metrics to determine the utility of a given annotation taxonomy and to adjust it.

A utilização de ferramentas digitais mudou a forma como interagimos com o texto escrito. A leitura ativa, em particular, onde um leitor crítico busca no texto elementos para a satisfação de hipóteses, exige que as interfaces digitais de acesso e manipulação de material textual permitam a expressão adequada dos processos cognitivos envolvidos no ato de leitura. Para realizar a leitura ativa, entretanto, o usuário depende de mecanismos intuitivos de anotação. Nesse contexto, esse trabalho apresenta uma proposta de métricas para a determinação da utilidade de uma taxonomia de anotações e para seu ajuste. / The use of digital tools changed the way we interact with written text. In particular, the active reading, where a critical reader searches the text for elements to satisfy her hypothesis, demands fromdigital interfaces to allowthe adequate expression of cognitive processes involved in the act of reading. To perform active reading, however, the user depends on intuitive annotation mechanisms. In this context, This work presents a proposal for metrics to determine the utility of a given annotation taxonomy and to adjust it.

A utilização de ferramentas digitais mudou a forma como interagimos com o texto escrito. A leitura ativa, em particular, onde um leitor crítico busca no texto elementos para a satisfação de hipóteses, exige que as interfaces digitais de acesso e manipulação de material textual permitam a expressão adequada dos processos cognitivos envolvidos no ato de leitura. Para realizar a leitura ativa, entretanto, o usuário depende de mecanismos intuitivos de anotação. Nesse contexto, esse trabalho apresenta uma proposta de métricas para a determinação da utilidade de uma taxonomia de anotações e para seu ajuste. / The use of digital tools changed the way we interact with written text. In particular, the active reading, where a critical reader searches the text for elements to satisfy her hypothesis, demands fromdigital interfaces to allowthe adequate expression of cognitive processes involved in the act of reading. To perform active reading, however, the user depends on intuitive annotation mechanisms. In this context, This work presents a proposal for metrics to determine the utility of a given annotation taxonomy and to adjust it.

In this research we introduce a novel reading system that enables Individuals with Blindness<br />or Severe Visual Impairment (IBSVI) to have equivalent spatial reading experience to their<br />sighted counterparts, in terms of being able to engage in different reading strategies e.g.<br />scanning, skimming, and active reading. IBSVI are enabled to read in a self-paced manner<br />with spatial access to the original layout of any electronic text document. This system<br />renders text on iPad-type devices, and reads aloud each word touched by the user\'s finger.<br />The user could move her finger smoothly along the lines to read continuously with the<br />support of tactile landmarks. A tactile overlay on the iPad screen helps IBSVI to navigate<br />a page, furnishing a framework of tactile landmarks to give IBSVI a sense of place on the<br />page. As the user moves her finger along the tangible pattern of the overlay, the text on the<br />screen that is touched is rendered audibly to speech. The system supports IBSVI to develop<br />and maintain a cognitive map of the structure and the layout of the page. IBSVI are enabled<br />to fuse audio, tactile landmarks, and spatial information in order to read.<br />The system\'s initial design is founded on a theoretical hypothesis. A participatory design<br />approach with IBSVI consultants was then applied to refine the initial design. The re"fined<br />design was tested in a usability study, which revealed two major issues with the tested<br />design. These issues are related to the lack of instant feedback from the system (psycho-<br />motorical problem), and the lack of conveying the semantic level of the page structure.<br />We adapted the reader design to solve the usability problems. The improved design was<br />tested in an experience sampling study. The results showed a leap in the system usability.<br />IBSVI participants successfully self-paced read spatial text. Further reading support was<br />then added to the system to improve the user experience while reading and interacting with<br />the system. We tested the latest design of the reader system with respect to its featured<br />function of enabling self-paced reading and re-finding information. A decomposition study<br />was conducted to evaluate the main components of the system; the tactile overlay, and the<br />intelligent active reading support. The results showed that both components are required<br />to achieve the best performance in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, and spatial perception.<br />We conducted an evaluation study to compare our reader system to the state-of-the-art<br />iBook with VoiceOver. The results show that our reader system is more effective than iBook<br />with VoiceOver in finding previously read information and in estimating the layout of the<br />page, implying that IBSVI were able to construct a cognitive map for the pages they read,<br />and perform advanced reading strategies. Our goal is to to enable IBSVI to access digital<br />reading materials effectively, so that they may have equal learning opportunities as their<br />sighted counterparts. / Ph. D.

This study investigates the potential benefits of reading strategy instruction in the English classroom in an L2 learner context. We examined the effects of reading strategy instruction on reading comprehension for L2 learners and investigated howreading strategies should be taught in the context of Swedish upper secondary school. To this end, six empirical studies were evaluated. We found that reading strategy instruction had a positive impact on reading comprehension in general, but that it was especially effective for certain student groups. Namely, intermediate learners benefitted more than other groups, while the weakest students improved the least in response to instruction. Furthermore, the research we examined suggests that it may be advantageous to focus on teaching a single strategy at a time. However, it is important to eventually expand students’ range ofstrategies long-term, since many pupils tend to over-rely on problem-solving strategies to the detriment of their progress in reading. Thus, emphasizing the less frequently used support strategies during instruction may help students read moreefficiently. Additionally, for reading strategies to best benefit learners, they should be taught in a clear, step-by-step manner. Finally, we argue that using aspects of Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory to inform lesson plans would greatly benefit students, especially those who are less proficient. Due to the lack of research in the increasingly heterogeneous Western world, future research should investigate how reading strategy instruction behaves in a multicultural context in the West.

Advances in computer technology have hastened the development and dissemination of a wide range of electronic media into the workplace and educational settings. Electronic media offer many advantages, including quicker access to information and easier information sharing among professions. However, electronic reading media have still not been well integrated into these settings, especially for non-routine cognitive tasks like active reading. Conflicting results from different measures (e.g., performance, preference) have been reported regarding their efficacy. Despite the fact that there are no significant performance differences between reading from paper and reading from electronic media, people still show a preference for reading from paper and resist changes in the workplace, which often results in the abandonment of electronic reading media. Therefore, in order to maximize the potential benefits from electronic reading media, researchers and designers need more valid ways to assess the effectiveness of electronic reading media than relying on existing methods using outcome-based measures of reading. Although the act of reading is primarily a cognitive process, there are relatively few comprehensive empirical reports on how the use of different reading media impacts cognitive processes like reading strategies. Moreover, researchers have rarely considered generational differences, even though generation-specific reading practices could significantly affect readers' current reading practices using different media. Therefore, the overall objective of this research was to develop and evaluate a new method to test the effectiveness of reading medium in terms of supporting design and evaluation. Specifically, this research examined how reading strategies can be used as a process measure. The research consisted of three parts: (1) investigating readers' use of reading strategies using different types of media, (2) identifying the relationship between readers' use of reading strategies and their performance and subjective response, and (3) identifying the relationship between readers' use of reading strategies and cognitive load. Resultant findings are expected to improve how we measure the effectiveness of electronic reading media. First, readers' use of reading strategies for different types of media was examined and associated generational differences were investigated. A laboratory experiment was conducted in which three generations of participants (Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Generation Y) were asked to perform an active reading task (a simulated work-related reading task) with three types of media (paper, computer, and iPad). Readers' uses of reading strategies were identified from task observation and Retrospective Think Aloud (RTA) sessions. Quantitative analyses revealed significant differences in readers' use of reading strategies, and which depended on both the type of media and individual attributes (generation). Detailed qualitative analyses were conducted to help explain the underlying reasons for these differences in the use of reading strategies. Second, based on the identified reading strategies, the relationships between readers' use of reading strategies and their performance and subjective responses were examined. Such outcome measures have traditionally been used to assess the efficacy of different reading media. However, previous studies have generated conflicting results and did not clearly demonstrate the underlying aspects that influence readers' performance and subjective responses. The results of this study showed a clear association between readers' use of reading strategies and their performance and subjective responses. Accordingly, it was revealed that participants who used the reading strategies they developed in their formative period exhibited higher subjective responses. Third, again based on the identified reading strategies, the association between readers' use of reading strategies and cognitive load was examined. Reading from electronic media has been regarded as requiring more cognitive resources than reading from paper. However, it has not been well understood precisely which aspects of reading from different media actually influence cognitive load in terms of cognitive and metacognitive perspectives. The results reported herein showed an association between reading strategies and cognitive load. Therefore, this study revealed that the use of reading strategies was critical to their cognitive load. Overall, this research demonstrated how reading strategies could be used as process measures to assess the effectiveness of specific media for active reading activities. The way in which people interact with a text (readers' use of reading strategies) was affected by the medium, as well as by generation-specific reading practices. The extent to which reading strategies can explain reading differences was confirmed, by investigating the associations between readers' use of reading strategies and other measures. These findings can contribute to the design of reading media and help to determine the most suitable reading media for active reading activities (e.g., work-related reading activities). In addition, the findings also support the importance of culturally situated experience for non-routine cognitive activities and the use of an integrated approach that takes into account both cognitive and cultural aspects in designing human-computer interaction for non-routine cognitive activities. / Ph. D.

To study a text, learners often engage in active reading. Through active reading, learners build an analysis by annotating, outlining, summarizing, reorganizing and synthesizing information. These strategies serve a fundamental meta-cognitive function that allows content to leave strong memory traces and helps learners reflect, understand, and recall information. Textbooks, however, are becoming more complex as new technologies change how they are designed and delivered. Interactive, touch-screen tablets offer multi-touch interaction, annotation features, and multimedia content as a browse-able book. Yet, such tablet textbooks-in spite of their increasing availability in educational settings-have received little empirical scrutiny regarding how they support and engender active reading. To address this issue, this dissertation reports on a series of studies designed to further our understanding of active reading with tablet textbooks. An exploratory study first examined strategies learners enact when reading and annotating in the tablet environment. Findings indicate learners are often distracted by touch screen mechanics, struggle to effectively annotate information delivered in audiovisuals, and labor to cognitively make connections between annotations and the content/media source from which they originated. These results inspired SMART Note, a suite of novel multimedia annotation tools for tablet textbooks designed to support active reading by: minimizing interaction mechanics during active reading, providing robust annotation for multimedia, and improving built-in study tools. The system was iteratively developed through several rounds of usability and user experience evaluation. A comparative experiment found that SMART Note outperformed tablet annotation features on the market in terms of supporting learning experience, process, and outcomes. Together these studies served to extend the active reading framework for tablet textbooks to: (a) recognize the tension between active reading and mechanical interaction; (b) provide designs that facilitate cognitive connections between annotations and media formats; and (c) offer opportunities for personalization and meaningful reorganization of learning material.

Alors que Twitter évolue vers un outil omniprésent de diffusion de l'information, la compréhension des tweets en langues étrangères devient un problème important et difficile. En raison de la nature intrinsèquement à commutation de code, discrète et bruitée des tweets, la traduction automatique (MT) à l'état de l'art n'est pas une option viable (Farzindar & Inkpen, 2015). En effet, au moins pour le hindi et le japonais, nous observons que le pourcentage de tweets « compréhensibles » passe de 80% pour les locuteurs natifs à moins de 30% pour les lecteurs monolingues cible (anglais ou français) utilisant Google Translate. Notre hypothèse de départ est qu'il devrait être possible de créer des outils génériques, permettant aux étrangers de comprendre au moins 70% des « tweets locaux », en utilisant une interface polyvalente de « lecture active » (LA, AR en anglais) tout en déterminant simultanément le pourcentage de tweets compréhensibles en-dessous duquel un tel système serait jugé inutile par les utilisateurs prévus.Nous avons donc spécifié un « SUFT » (système d'aide à la compréhension des tweets étrangers) générique, et mis en œuvre SUFT-1, un système interactif à mise en page multiple basé sur la LA, et facilement configurable en ajoutant des dictionnaires, des modules morphologiques et des plugins de TA. Il est capable d'accéder à plusieurs dictionnaires pour chaque langue source et fournit une interface d'évaluation. Pour les évaluations, nous introduisons une mesure liée à la tâche induisant un coût négligeable, et une méthodologie visant à permettre une « évaluation continue sur des données ouvertes », par opposition aux mesures classiques basées sur des jeux de test liés à des ensembles d'apprentissage fermés. Nous proposons de combiner le taux de compréhensibilité et le temps de décision de compréhensibilité comme une mesure de qualité à deux volets, subjectif et objectif, et de vérifier expérimentalement qu'une présentation de type lecture active, basée sur un dictionnaire, peut effectivement aider à comprendre les tweets mieux que les systèmes de TA disponibles.En plus de rassembler diverses ressources lexicales, nous avons construit une grande ressource de "formes de mots" apparaissant dans les tweets indiens, avec leurs analyses morphologiques (à savoir 163221 formes de mots hindi dérivées de 68788 lemmes et 72312 formes de mots marathi dérivées de 6026 lemmes) pour créer un analyseur morphologique multilingue spécialisé pour les tweets, capable de gérer des tweets à commutation de code, de calculer des traits unifiés, et de présenter un tweet en lui attachant un graphe de LA à partir duquel des lecteurs étrangers peuvent extraire intuitivement une signification plausible, s'il y en a une. / As Twitter evolves into a ubiquitous information dissemination tool, understanding tweets in foreign languages becomes an important and difficult problem. Because of the inherent code-mixed, disfluent and noisy nature of tweets, state-of-the-art Machine Translation (MT) is not a viable option (Farzindar & Inkpen, 2015). Indeed, at least for Hindi and Japanese, we observe that the percentage of "understandable" tweets falls from 80% for natives to below 30% for target (English or French) monolingual readers using Google Translate. Our starting hypothesis is that it should be possible to build generic tools, which would enable foreigners to make sense of at least 70% of “native tweets”, using a versatile “active reading” (AR) interface, while simultaneously determining the percentage of understandable tweets under which such a system would be deemed useless by intended users.We have thus specified a generic "SUFT" (System for Helping Understand Tweets), and implemented SUFT-1, an interactive multi-layout system based on AR, and easily configurable by adding dictionaries, morphological modules, and MT plugins. It is capable of accessing multiple dictionaries for each source language and provides an evaluation interface. For evaluations, we introduce a task-related measure inducing a negligible cost, and a methodology aimed at enabling a « continuous evaluation on open data », as opposed to classical measures based on test sets related to closed learning sets. We propose to combine understandability ratio and understandability decision time as a two-pronged quality measure, one subjective and the other objective, and experimentally ascertain that a dictionary-based active reading presentation can indeed help understand tweets better than available MT systems.In addition to gathering various lexical resources, we constructed a large resource of "word-forms" appearing in Indian tweets with their morphological analyses (viz. 163221 Hindi word-forms from 68788 lemmas and 72312 Marathi word-forms from 6026 lemmas) for creating a multilingual morphological analyzer specialized to tweets, which can handle code-mixed tweets, compute unified features, and present a tweet with an attached AR graph from which foreign readers can intuitively extract a plausible meaning, if any.

Shaping of students' attitudes in geographical education - the issue of Ips typographus outbreaks Abstract The diploma thesis deals with shaping the students' attitudes by utilising various texts during the geography classes. This experiment is shown on particular problem of Spruce Bark Beetle in the National Park of Šumava. There are two main streams towards this issue of Spruce Bark Beetle-one of them promotes the idea of incorporating the human intervention, while reducing the disaster, the other follows the opposite attitude towards the outbreak of the Spruce Bark Beetle, and that is not to intervene at all and to leave the destructed vegetation to regenerate. The backbone of the thesis is represented by a survey that aims at finding attitudes towards the problem mentioned above. Moreover, the survey also questions the way the attitudes change depending on critical reading of distinctive texts. Two main questions are posed in this research. The results are graphically depicted and commented upon in the thesis. The research shows the extent to which it is possible to influence the students' opinion utilising quality study texts. Key words: Spruce Bark Beetle (Ips typographus), National park Šumava, Spruce Bark Beetle outbreak, geographical education, critical thinking, active reading, shaping of attitudes