Many problems related to information systems implementation are psychological rather than technical. It is necessary to adapt good enough to the current situation in the business to avoid bad user reactions. One of the most important quality factors of an information system is user acceptance. Information system implementation projects have been historically bothered by failures for which user resistance has been identified as an important reason. A poor adaptation of old data may cause user frustration. But the most important problem perhaps is how to deal with the people and know their psychological constraints involved in the system change, their lack of competence And also their reluctance to accept the new system. A poorly designed system interface also becomes an obstacle for the users and they would become more unwilling to tolerate it. This study presents a theoretical and empirical understanding of user acceptance during the implementation of an information system and provides suggestions to an individual and also organizations for tackling such resistance and enhances user satisfaction. / Program: Magisterutbildning i informatik

E-learning is a rapidly emerging concept facilitating learners in the field of education. Continuous advancements in information technologies are enhancing the possibilities of its growth. Developed countries have realised its strength and adopted it warmly but in developing countries it is still a new concept. There are many limitations in developing countries for its implementation and growth. In my research I have identified the core limitations associated with the growth of E-learning in developing countries and found out some possible solutions. I have selected different subject areas which can support in solving my research questions. In the textual analysis I have found that different cultural, technological and awareness problems are creating obstacles for its implementation. In the empirical survey these problems are verified from the students and teachers who are associated with E-learning and would like to see its implementation in developing countries. In the results of my research findings I have shown how information technology can be helpful for enhancing the possibilities of E-learning and identified how sub systems of E-learning can support its growth.

<p> Hlinak and Delic and Becirovic, among others, addressed the connection between the use of the Socratic method and critical thinking development. Hlinak noted while there is an abundance of research on the Socratic method and distance learning, there are relatively few publications that address the intersection. With the continued growth of online education, there is a lack of research primarily on the perspectives of online faculty members. The purpose of the study was to gain the perspectives of online faculty members for effectively using the Socratic method in an online higher education environment to improve critical thinking skills and their application to decision making. An additional goal was the possible development of a research model to explain the use of the Socratic method in the online environment. Garrison's online community of inquiry was a primary supportive theory. Additional theories supporting this study included the Socratic method, James's pragmatism, Dewey's critical thinking, and Paul's formalized critical thinking. Globalization and Christensen's disruptive innovation also supported this research. Online faculty perspectives are essential; faculty are responsible for establishing pedagogy (e.g., teaching strategies, course design, and instructional intervention) for classrooms. The research questions addressed: (a) what teaching strategies, course design, instructional interventions, and delivery options are needed to implement the use of the Socratic method in the online classroom; (b) what influence does the use of the Socratic method have on cognitive presence; and (c) what effect does the increase of cognitive presence have on critical thinking and decision-making skills in nonclassroom activities and the workplace. Using qualitative exploratory research methodology, data were collected from faculty in an online educator forum using an online questionnaire and personal telephone interviews were conducted with faculty from an online doctoral program. Based on participant experiences, the Socratic method supports critical thinking development and fosters cognitive presence with students. According to the participants, the connection between the Socratic method and critical thinking extends these skills to nonacademic settings and the workplace. The participants made a number of recommendations to improve the effectiveness of the Socratic method in the online environment including integrating the Socratic method in course designs.</p><p>

The primary aim of this study was to investigate the effects of two video-based interventions, one guided, the other non-guided, on pre-service early childhood education teachers' understanding of students' mathematical thinking. Five web-based lessons on various topics in children's mathematical development were created for this study. Each contained a short reading introducing a videotaped clinical interview of a young child performing a mathematical task. The unguided group then watched a 2-minute video, while the guided group watched the same video segmented into short clips and then answered open-ended questions at each break. The main goal was to examine the effectiveness of the use of videotaped clinical interviews in professional development. More specifically, I was interested in the types of experiences offered by the guided and unguided versions, as compared to those of the control group. The results of this study showed that both the guided- and unguided-video experiences were successful in changing the way prospective teachers interpreted children's mathematical thinking. While the results show it was possible to use videos to improve prospective teachers' interpretive abilities, it was not possible to improve their ability to apply the interpretations to developing appropriate teaching activities.

Metacomprehension refers to the ability to judge one's own comprehension. Studies in the literature have shown that generating keywords after reading helps adults and children make comprehension judgments that are better correlated with their actual comprehension. Researchers have also found that when metacomprehension is framed in terms of confidence, there is an effect of ability, where individuals with low ability tend to be overconfident in their judgments, while those with high ability tend to be underconfident. This paper describes two experiments investigating metacomprehension in seventh graders. Experiment 1 sought to replicate and extend the finding that generating keywords after reading improves the accuracy of comprehension judgments and the effectiveness of study choices. To account for potential effects of time on task, participants in the control condition were asked to read passages twice in lieu of generating keywords. Two measures of metacomprehension accuracy (signed differences and gamma correlations) were based on comprehension judgments taken at two time points (pre-test and post-test). The moderating effects of reading ability were also examined. The results of Experiment 1 showed that participants were overconfident in their judgments of their own comprehension. Overconfidence was greater for pre-test predictions than for post-test reflections, and it was also greater for participants with lower reading ability. Generating keywords caused participants to become significantly less overconfident- or more accurate- from pre-test to post-test in their comprehension judgments, but it did not actually boost comprehension scores. In other words, generating keywords helped participants know that they did not know; it did not, however, help them know more. In Experiment 2, the investigation of generating keywords and rereading text was situated within a new context incorporating practice test questions. Studies have shown that practice testing is an effective study strategy. Additionally, since researchers have found that learners can use information about peer performance as a basis for making judgments about themselves, Experiment 2 also asked whether peer collaboration might increase metacomprehension accuracy. Participants were randomly assigned to four conditions: individual/keyword, individual/reread, collaborate/keyword, and collaborate/reread. All participants answered practice test questions; participants in the individual conditions worked on the questions alone, while participants in the collaborative conditions discussed the questions with a partner. As in Experiment 1, participants in Experiment 2 were also overconfident in judging their own comprehension. Again, there was an effect for time of judgment, such that predictions were more overconfident than were reflections. Surprisingly, peer collaboration was found to lead to greater overconfidence in comprehension judgments. Participants who collaborated with a peer were more overconfident than participants who worked alone. Experiment 2 showed that in the presence of practice testing and peer collaboration, the interactive effect of keyword generation and time of judgment was minimized. Within the keyword group, participants who collaborated and participants who worked alone did not differ in overconfidence. Within the reread group, however, participants who collaborated were significantly more overconfident than those who worked alone. Taken together, these two studies suggest that middle school students are generally overconfident in their judgments of comprehension. However, the results indicate that study strategies designed to enhance comprehension and learning can be effective in reducing students' overconfidence about themselves.

Adolescence is a time filled with opportunities for making choices that have not been encountered before. How do adolescents learn to make these decisions? Maturation of learning processes coupled with dynamic changes in brain systems for learning must be studied in order to determine the mechanisms that underlie adolescent decision making. Research in adults has found contributions from multiple learning systems for decision making. One such system learns incrementally from feedback and reinforcement, and depends in part on the striatum. Another system, in the hippocampus, encodes episodes and allows for flexible use of learned information when required by novel contexts. Recent research in adults explores how these systems can cooperate and compete to facilitate decision making. Ongoing research into learning and decision making processes over the course of adolescence has also implicated the striatum in learning and decision making, but how the hippocampus and striatum interact for decision making remains unknown. In this dissertation I investigate contributions of multiple learning systems for learning and decision making in adolescence. I leverage what is known about underlying brain systems for learning and decision making in adults, and consider how changes in these same systems over adolescence might contribute to behavioral shifts in adolescence. Specifically, in the studies included here, I show how developmental trajectories for learning can enhance performance in adolescents for some types of learning and not others. In the first study I ask how do the striatal and hippocampal systems contribute to feedback based learning in adolescence? I show that in adolescents, both the hippocampus and the striatum contribute to probabilistic feedback learning, and that this type of learning is better in adolescents than in adults. This response to feedback in the hippocampus was found to relate to memory accuracy for features of feedback events only in adolescents. Pushing the finding of hippocampal activation in adolescents, in the second study I ask how does learned value influence flexible decision making in adolescence? Adolescents did not show reliable transfer of value, but there were individual differences in this tendency. Thus, in the third study, I ask which brain regions account for individual differences in learning and value transfer? I show that variability in connectivity at rest between the hippocampus and the vmPFC related to the tendency to transfer value in adults. Taken together, these results contribute to a growing body of research in adolescent decision making, and extend upon our understanding of the mechanisms for learning and decision making systems, and how they change over development.

Teacher feedback is a useful tool that can actively engage students in learning and help them improve content knowledge. However, students are generally not motivated to use the teacher feedback. The present study investigated whether self-assessment devices can promote students’ usage of teacher feedback among 5th through 8th graders. Self-assessment is a process during which students monitor and judge their learning process often with tools that provide perspective. The present study hypothesized that a self-assessment intervention utilizing rubrics and guiding questions would help students to successfully revise their work as the teacher feedback intends, accurately predict their performance, become receptive to the teacher’s criticism, and increase their content knowledge. While rubrics contain a list of criteria that the teacher expects students to achieve for each problem, guiding questions ask students to identify areas where they perform well and other areas where they need improvement. The present study took the form of an experiment, with participants divided into two Groups: Experimental (N=89) and Control (N=84). The Experimental Group students used the intervention, whereas the Control Group students did not use the intervention. Every participant worked on solving problems, revising their work, answering questions about the experience, and expressing their preference for the type of teacher feedback in mathematics. The study hypothesized that the self-assessment devices would help students to successfully revise their work as the teacher feedback intends, more accurately predict their performance, become receptive to the teacher’s criticism, and increase their content knowledge. The results showed that the self-assessment intervention helped the students successfully revise their work; furthermore, specific teacher feedback was more effective than general teacher feedback in terms of assisting them to revise. Students who used the intervention demonstrated higher levels of receptivity to negative feedback. On the other hand, the self-assessment intervention showed no significant effect on students’ ability to accurately predict their own performance and it did not produce better mathematics problem solvers. The results suggest that teachers need to provide feedback that precisely locates errors in students’ work and offer specific direction for improvement. Teachers also need to emphasize the purpose of the self-assessment and feedback usage, so that students become more aware of its importance. Furthermore, improving the student-teacher relationship and implementing other forms of self-assessment may enhance the effect of self-assessment on the successful use of feedback by students.

Curiosity drives many of our daily pursuits and interactions; yet, we know surprisingly little about how it works. Here, I harness an idea implied in many conceptualizations of curiosity – that information has value in and of itself. Reframing curiosity as the motivation to obtain reward – where the reward is information – allows me to leverage major advances in theoretical and computational mechanisms of reward-motivated learning. Using willingness to wait, an established measure of reward-motivated behavior, I test the reward value of information, finding that people are more willing to wait for information about which they’re more curious. I then provide new evidence supporting several predictions that emerge from this information-as-reward framework. In Chapter 1, I examine whether the valence of information affects its reward value, finding an asymmetric effect of positive vs. negative information, with positive valence associated with both enhanced curiosity and enhanced long-term memory for information. I then test an idea drawn from computational and neurobiological accounts of reward learning, which suggest that it is not the absolute value of information that drives learning, but, rather, the gap between the reward expected and the reward received. By asking people to rate both their curiosity about a question and their satisfaction with the answer, I obtain measures of the values of the reward expected (curiosity) and the reward received (satisfaction) and find that the discrepancy between the two – the information prediction error – facilitates learning. These findings suggest a conceptual correspondence between dopaminergic mechanisms of reward learning and curiosity. Aging is associated with decrements in dopaminergic functioning, but it is unclear whether these deficits extend to curiosity, as few behavioral investigations of curiosity and aging exist. In Chapter 2, I, therefore, sought to explore the effects of aging on curiosity, providing behavioral evidence that curiosity is not diminished in aging, but, rather, that it is enhanced. These findings also revealed that older adults are more likely to wait for more positive information, consistent with existing theories of emotional processing. In Chapter 3, I sought to test whether the dopaminergic reward system, particularly the striatum, plays a necessary and causal role in curiosity by examining curiosity in patients with Parkinson’s disease, a neurological disorder characterized by dopamine depletion in the striatum and striatal dysfunction. I provide evidence for diminished curiosity in people with Parkinson’s disease, relative to age- and education-matched controls. In particular, I find that participants with Parkinson’s disease are less likely to wait for lower-value rewards, i.e., information about which they’re less curious. Taken together, these results support the idea that information functions as a reward – much like money or food – guiding choices and driving learning in systematic ways.

Idea generation is the essence of design as everyday problem solving. Generating ideas can be a matter of life and death or simply a distraction from our normal existence. The eureka moment also means that sometimes people improvise and repurpose whatever is at hand to solve their own problems. As a consequence, a chair becomes a bookshelf; a shoelace can be used to stop bleeding. Generating alternative uses for common household objects should be facilitated by generating alternative situations in which improvisational design might be needed. One way to encourage as many alternative ideas as possible is to think through heuristics of discovery. A number of directions have emerged concerning what can be used as good design heuristics to trigger creative mindsets. Does "walking away from the problem" or "letting the mind wander" really help generate a greater number of alternative ideas? How might shifting a perspective activate proper associative processing and enhance creative performance? Prior studies in generating novel uses often directed people to focus on objects, situations, and events, or to switch between a different time or space. One plausible method yet to be studied systematically, however, is for participants to think of different roles people can take in a society, such as chef, physician, mechanic, athlete, and so on. This dissertation research sets out to uncover certain creative mindsets and potential design heuristics that promote alternative solutions to problems ordinary people encounter in daily life. The studies conducted for this dissertation particularly focus on two mindset conditions: the mind-wandering group was manipulated to "let things come to your mind" and the human-centric group was manipulated to "think of different roles," both conditions representing widespread beliefs among professional designers about generating ideas. In two online experiments, participants were asked to generate as many alternative uses of common household objects as they could using either the mind- wandering or the human-centric mindsets triggered by different search heuristics. Study 1 had a control group and names of objects. Study 2 presented pictures of objects to half the participants and names of objects to the other half. The dependent variables were the fluency of ideas, the originality of ideas, the diversity of assignable roles and the response time between ideas. Results in both studies support the effectiveness of thinking of different roles in the human-centric mindset condition in increasing the fluency of alternative uses and the originality of ideas. Participants given no particular search strategy frequently reported that they tended to have things come to their minds, but they didn’t differ from the mind- wandering mindset group and were outperformed by those using the human-centric mindset strategy. Furthermore, seeing pictures didn’t necessarily give either mindset group the edge in generating more uses and more original ideas. Presenting the names of objects and providing specific roles with the search heuristics seemed enough to help induce a diversity of roles and hence more alternative uses and more original ideas. Those who let their minds wander did take longer to generate ideas than those using the focused associations of roles. The general findings in the dissertation are consistent with previous research showing that those who generated more ideas were more likely to generate more original ideas and those who persisted in ideation more frequently produced more original uses. On the whole, this dissertation research provides significant evidence for the heuristics of roles as a powerful perspective shifter to enhance everyday design concepts for human scale.

This dissertation research focuses on assessing student behavior, academic emotions, and knowledge within a middle school online learning environment, and analyzing potential effects on students’ interests and choices related to decisions about going to college. Using students’ longitudinal data ranging from their middle school, to high school, to postsecondary years, this dissertation uses quantitative methodologies to investigate antecedents to college attendance that occur as early as middle school. The dissertation asks whether student behavior, academic emotions, and learning as early as middle school can be predictive of college attendance years later. This is investigated by developing predictive and structural models of said outcomes, using assessments of learning, emotions and engagement from student interaction data from an online learning environment they used in their middle school curriculum. The same middle school factors are also assessed with self-report measures of course choices, interests in college majors and careers formed when they were in high school. The dissertation then evaluates how student choices and interests in high school can mediate between the educational experiences students have during middle school and their eventual college attendance, to give a fuller illustration of the cognitive and non-cognitive mechanisms that students may experience throughout varied periods in school. Such understanding may provide educators with actionable information about a students’ in-depth experiences and trajectories within the college pipeline.