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Understanding Teacher Users of a Digital Library Service: A Clustering Approach

This research examined teachers' online behaviors while using a digital library service--the Instructional Architect (IA)--through three consecutive studies. In the first two studies, a statistical model called latent class analysis (LCA) was applied to cluster different groups of IA teachers according to their diverse online behaviors. The third study further examined relationships between teachers' demographic characteristics and their usage patterns. Several user clusters emerged from the LCA results of Study I. These clusters were named isolated islanders, lukewarm teachers, goal-oriented brokerswindow shoppers, key brokers, beneficiaries, classroom practitioners, and dedicated sticky users. In Study II, a cleaning process was applied to the clusters discovered in Study I to further refine distinct user groups. Results revealed three clusters, key brokers, insular classroom practitioners, and ineffective islanders. In Study III, the integration of teacher demographic profiles with clustering results revealed that teaching experience and technology knowledge affected teachers' effectiveness in using the IA. The implication, contributions, and limitation of this research are discussed.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UTAHS/oai:digitalcommons.usu.edu:etd-1886
Date01 May 2011
CreatorsXu, Beijie
PublisherDigitalCommons@USU
Source SetsUtah State University
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceAll Graduate Theses and Dissertations
RightsCopyright for this work is held by the author. Transmission or reproduction of materials protected by copyright beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of the copyright owners. Works not in the public domain cannot be commercially exploited without permission of the copyright owner. Responsibility for any use rests exclusively with the user. For more information contact Andrew Wesolek (andrew.wesolek@usu.edu).

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