In 2011 the Missionary Department sponsored a development project focused on creating performance support tools for international missionary training centers (IMTCs). The purpose of the project was to determine an area where there was a gap between desired performance and actual performance for IMTC training managers and develop tools to support them in improving performance in the chosen area. The target area supported the IMTC training managers in helping part-time teachers improve their effectiveness. Two products were created to help managers work more effectively with their teachers and a third product is currently under development. The first was a teacher competency print resource that managers could use to guide their feedback and evaluations of teachers. The second was a set of standards and suggestions managers could implement to help teachers improve. The third was an electronic teacher-tracking tool that would allow managers to track the progress and goals of each teacher. The design model used was a combination of a rapid prototyping model, cascade design model, and an electronic performance support design model. It included four major iterations for the products. This paper discusses the various stages of the development process, including adjustments to the planned design model, prototypes, and finalized products.

Floating describes the act of staff moving from one unit to another based on the needs of the patients in a hospital. Many staff who float to different units express negative feelings, including anxiety and lack in self-efficacy. However, floating is both an economical and efficient method to use staff across the hospital, especially with current staffing shortages in the United States. This study investigated how the use of mobile performance support devices may help reduce anxiety and increase self-efficacy for those staff who float to different units. with access to multiple resources available on the mobile device, Bandura's social learning theory and self-efficacy concept set the framework through modeling, observing, and imitating others in order to reproduce certain behaviors and tasks and believe in one's capability to perform. a quantitative study incorporating the retrospective pretest-posttest design was conducted using the population of float staff, including both nurses and respiratory therapists, from Children's Medical Center of Dallas. Both the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory and General Self-Efficacy Scale, along with a basic demographic tool, were used to explore anxiety and self-efficacy in relation to the usage of mobile performance support devices. Findings can be used to impact the negative feelings of staff towards the idea of floating.

As more artifacts are created in a digital format, there is a need to have metadata associated with the artifacts to increase the chance for resource discovery by others. This is especially the case with non-textual artifacts. Once these artifacts have descriptive metadata associated with them, they have the potential to become learning objects which can be used by others in their own teaching and research. This study explored the design and development of a performance support tool to create descriptive metadata by users that are most familiar with the non-textual learning objects, yet may not have an understanding of the various metadata schemas and standards required by other institutional/knowledge repositories and search engines. In order to create such a tool, certain features need to be included in order for users to create appropriate metadata. The tool needs to have Unicode character support in order metadata entry, display and searching. Research found that characteristics such as controlled vocabularies, tooltips, validation rules, and having a relevant image on the same screen as the metadata form help users to create appropriate and accurate metadata; yet, no existing tool was found that contained all of these features to assist faculty in describing their non-textual learning objects. These characteristics were operationalized in the design and development of the performance support tool. Findings from the evaluation of the tool indicate that the owner of the learning objects was able to create a customized, non-standard metadata form that users were then able to use to create appropriate and accurate descriptive metadata. / Ph. D.

The numbers of students with disabilities enrolling in postsecondary institutions has increased since the passage of key disability rights legislation. As a result, the need for information about accommodating postsecondary students with disabilities has increased in the last two decades, especially since the passage of the Higher Education Amendments of 1998. This study used Dick and Carey's (1996) model of instructional design to conduct a formative evaluation of a Web-based performance support system (WPSS) designed for academic administrators, instructional employees, and auxiliary service administrators to enhance accommodations for postsecondary students with disabilities. Formative evaluation consisted of expert review, one-to-one, consumer analysis, and field trial phases. During the expert review phase, subject matter experts, instructional design and usability experts, and individuals with disabilities completed surveys to assess the degree to which the WPSS contained current content, included elements of effective design, and was accessible to individuals with disabilities. During the one-to-one, consumer analysis, and field trial phases, academic administrators, instructional personnel, and auxiliary service administrators on the University of Kentucky campus completed a questionnaire using the WPSS to assess the degree to which the WPSS was effective in providing information. In addition, users completed a survey to assess their perceptions of the WPSS. Finally, data were collected to assess difficulties encountered by users. Results from the expert review phase of the evaluation suggest that the WPSS contained current content, included elements of effective design, and was accessible to individuals with disabilities. Analysis of the questionnaire scores from all phases revealed that users obtained a mean accuracy rate of 74% or higher on the in-session questionnaire. In addition, all users required a mean of 3.9 minutes or less per question to locate responses for items on the questionnaire. The perceptions of all users about the WPSS were positive. Results also indicated that users reported a variety of technical difficulties; however, the majority were related to server errors. Revisions made to the WPSS after each phase of evaluation are described. Implications of the investigation for researchers and Web developers, limitations of the investigation, and areas for future research also are discussed.

The following report is a description of the design, development, and evaluation of an online statistics performance support system. The target audience for the support system is students of Instructional Psychology and Technology (IP&T), especially those who have taken the IP&T 550 "Empirical Inquiry and Statistics" course. The product is designed to be used as a supplemental reference tool. The main purpose of the online performance support system is to help IP&T students select appropriate statistical procedures for their research and learn how to perform the necessary calculations using a statistics analysis software package called SPSS. This report summarizes the needs analysis, target audience analysis, instructional design process and the formative evaluation of the product. The results of the evaluation indicated that the users found great value in the product, that it was useful and effective in helping them select an appropriate statistical procedure, and that it helped them conduct the procedure in SPSS.

This study evaluated the usability of two types of performance-support interfaces that were designed using informational and experiential approaches. The experiment sought to determine whether there is a relationship between usability and the informational and experiential approaches. The general population under study was undergraduate education major students from the University of Central Florida. From the general population of three educational technology instructor-led classes, 83 students were solicited to participate in the study by completing a class activity. From the general population, a total of 63 students participated in the study. By participating in the study, the students completed a task and a questionnaire. Students were predominantly English-speaking Caucasian female education majors between the ages of 19 and 20; most of them were sophomores or juniors working part time. They possessed moderately low to high computer skills and most considered themselves to have intermediate or expert Internet skills. An experimental posttest-only comparison group research design was used to test the hypotheses posited for this study. The participants were randomly assigned to either the informational interface group (X1) or the experiential interface group (X2), and the experiment was conducted electronically via a Web-based Content Management System (CMS). The observed data consisted of five outcome measures: efficiency, errors, intuitiveness, satisfaction, and student performance. Two instruments--a checklist and an online usability questionnaire--were used to measure the five dependent variables: efficiency, intuitiveness, errors, satisfaction, and student performance. The CMS was used as the vehicle to distribute and randomize the two interfaces, obtain informed consent, distribute the instructions, distribute the online questionnaire, and collect data. First, a checklist was used to assess the students' performance completing their task, which was a copyright issue request letter. The checklist was designed as a performance criterion tool for the researcher, instructor, and participants to use. The researcher and instructor constructed the checklist to grade copyright request letters and determine students' performance. The participants had the opportunity to use the checklist as a performance criterion to create the task document (copyright request letter). The checklist consisted of ten basic yet critical sections of a successful copyright request letter. Second, an online usability questionnaire was constructed based on the Purdue Usability Testing Questionnaire (PUTQ) questions to measure interface efficiency, intuitiveness, errors, and satisfaction. While these test items have been deemed important for testing the usability of a particular system, for purposes of this study, test items were modified, deleted, and added to ensure content validity. The new survey, University of Central Florida Usability Questionnaire (UCFUQ), consisting of 20 items, was implemented in a pilot study to ensure reliability and content validity. Changes to the PUTQ were modified to fulfill a blueprint. A pilot study of the instrument yielded a reliability coefficient of .9450, and the final online usability instrument yielded a reliability coefficient of .9321. This study tested two approaches to user interface design for the Electronic Performance Support (EPS) using two HTML interface templates and the information from an existing training module. There were two interventions consisting of two interface types: informational and experiential. The SPSS Graduate Pack 10.0 for Windows was used for data analysis and statistical reporting in this study. A t test was conducted to determine if a difference existed between the two interface means. ANOVA was conducted to determine if there was an interaction between the interface group means and the demographic data factored among the five dependent variables. Results of this study indicated that students at the University of Central Florida reported no differences between the two interface types. It was postulated that the informational interface would yield a higher mean score because of its implementation of HCI guidelines, conventions, and standards. However, it was concluded that the informational interface may not be a more usable interface. Users may be as inclined to use the experiential interface as the informational interface.

<p>This thesis documents research encompassing the design of dynamic electronic performance support systems. Essentially, an Electronic Performance Support System (EPSS) is complex distributed software that provides on-the-job support in order to facilitate task performance within some particular target application domain. In view of the rapid pace of change in current business and industrial environments, the conventional practice of issuing a new release of Electronic Performance Support System (EPSS) every few years to incorporate changes, is no longer practical. An EPSS is required to adapt to the changes as soon as possible and without the need for major code modification. This is accomplished by creating a design in which task specific knowledge is not hard coded in the software but is extracted on the fly. The design also enables a loose coupling among different modules of the system so that functionalities may be added, removed, modified or extended with minimum disruption. In this thesis we show how to combine service-oriented architecture with the concepts of software agents to achieve a software architecture that provides the required agility. Traditionally Unified Modeling Language (UML), which lacks formal semantics, has been the tool of choice for design and analysis of such systems and that means formal analysis techniques cannot be used for verification of UML models, whereas Software Engineering practices require analysis and verification at an early stage in the software development process. In this thesis we present an algorithm to transform UML state chart models to Object Coloured Petri (OCP) nets that have a strong mathematical foundation and can be implemented by standard tools such as Design/CPN for simulation and dynamic analysis in order to verify behavioural properties of the model. We show how to apply this technique to verify some of the desirable behavioural properties of the proposed EPSS architecture. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach we have successfully implemented a prototype of an EPSS based on the proposed design.</p> <p>The main contributions of this research are: 1. Proposed an anthropomorphic architecture for a dynamic PSS. 2. Combined the concepts of services oriented architecture and software agents to achieve dynamic updating of task specific knowledge and minimal coupling between different modules of complex software to allow painless evolution. 3. Brought formal methods to the design phase in the development of agent based software systems by proposing an algorithm to transform UML state diagrams to OCP nets for dynamic analysis. 4. Modelled the dynamic creation and deletion of objects/agents using OCP net concepts and Design/CPN. 5. Proposed an architecture that can be used for creating families of agile PSS.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This study explored the design and development of an electronic performance enhancement tool that can assist a person with limited programming skills to create a variety of simple customized information management websites. In particular, this study was modeled after needs within an Instruction Technology department in which individuals were able to create pre-functional web pages with various elements such as textboxes and dropdown menus but lacked the programming skills necessary to add functionality to these web forms. Skilled programmers could add functionality to these pre-functioning web forms or create customized information management websites from scratch. However, programmers are not always available when needed. At the time of this study, there was no readily available way for persons to create customized information management websites without the services of a programmer or without needing to learn programming skills themselves. This study sought to determine what functionalities, characteristics and capabilities could be included in an electronic performance enhancement tool to assist non-programmers to create simple customized information management websites and how a tool with such functionalities, characteristics and capabilities could be designed and developed. A prototype version of such tool (named the Form And DataBase Interaction Tool or "FADBIT") was designed and developed in this study. This tool asks users who have created simple pre-functional web forms to answer a series of questions related to those webforms. Given the user's responses to these questions, this tool is able to form a metalanguage representation of the user's intentions for the web form and can translate this representation into useful programming code to add the desired functionality. The tool was successfully designed and developed using a generalized modular framework, and a Create-Adapt-Generalize model, with each module addressing one or more patterns common to web programming. The prototype tool successfully allowed non-programmers to create functional information websites for two structured evaluation projects, and achieved some level of success and encountered some difficulties with an unstructured project. Proposed modifications and extensions to the tool to address the difficulties encountered are presented. / Ph. D.

Do you remember the first time you used an Automatic Teller Machine (ATM)? Or a pay-at-the-pump gas station? Or an airline e-ticket kiosk? How did you know what to do? Although you never received any formal instruction in how to interact with the self-service technology, you were likely able to accomplish your task (e.g., withdrawing or depositing money) as successfully as an experienced user. However, not so long ago, to accomplish that same task, you needed the direct mediation of a service professional who had been trained how to use the required complex technology. What has changed? In short, the technology is now able to compensate for the average consumer's lack of experience with the transactional system. The technology itself bridges the performance gap, allowing a novice to accomplish the same task as an experienced professional. This shift to a self-service paradigm is completely changing the dynamics of the consumer relationship with the capitalist enterprise, resulting in what is rapidly becoming the default consumer interface of the postmodern era. The recognition that the entire performance support apparatus now revolves around the end user/consumer rather than the employee represents a tectonic shift in the workforce training industry. What emerges is a homogenized consumer culture enabled by self-service technologies--a kiosk culture. No longer is the ability to interact with complex technology confined to a privileged workforce minority who has access to expensive and time-consuming training. The growth of the kiosk culture is being driven equally by business financial pressures, consumer demand for more efficient transactions, and the improved sophistication of compensatory technology that allows a novice to perform a task with the same competence as an expert. "The Kiosk Culture" examines all aspects of self-service technology and its ascendancy. Beyond the milieu of business, the kiosk culture is also infiltrating all corners of society, including medicine, athletics, and the arts, forcing us to re-examine our definitions of knowledge, skills, performance, and even humanity. The current ubiquity of self-service technology has already impacted our society and will continue to do so as we ride the rising tide of the kiosk culture.

The purpose of the current study was to examine the level of support for innovation and individual creativity as potential mediators of relationship between managerial task performance, managerial contextual performance, organizational financial performance and employee performance in non-profit sport organizations in Turkey. For the purpose of the study, 721 volunteer managers and employees from 21 Department/School of Physical Education and Sport (D-SPES) and 23 Province Directorates of Youth and Sport (PDYS) were participated in the study. Individual Creativity Scale, Support for Innovation Scale, Managerial Task Performance Scale, Managerial Contextual Performance Scale, Organizational Financial Performance Scale, and Employee Performance Scale were used for data collection. Results of the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analysis revealed that the model adequately describes the data for the sample and the fit indices were all within the acceptable thresholds. The model accounted for 68% variance in support for innovation, 0.7% variance in individual creativity and 44% variance in employee performance. These results suggested that support for innovation and individual creativity significantly mediate the effects of managerial task performance, managerial contextual performance and organizational financial performance on employee performance.