Research Database
| Project Description | |||
| (submitted 02/09/2004) | |||
| Dental professionals' search behavior on the World-Wide Web to improve an Adaptive Hypermedia | |||
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Contact Information:
3501 Terrace Street Phone (412) 648-8886 |
Principal Investigator: |
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Project Description: Efficient information retrieval is one of the most important skills for dental professionals when interacting with information technology. Thus, we developed an online course "Information Retrieval for Dental Professionals" at the School of Dental Medicine, Center for Dental Informatics which is used for predoctoral teaching and is planned to be used for continuing education and training. In order to allow one course for such a broad and diverse audience, we designed the course as Adaptive Hypermedia (AH) systems. AH is an emerging research direction focusing on systems which try to overcome the problem that users with different goals and knowledge may be interested in different pieces of information presented about a topic. This learner-centered education begins with the selection of a learning goal, the evaluation of abilities and the determination of the individual learning style to facilitate the tailoring of the offered material. In order to improve the course further, it is important to understand how dental professionals search for information. In particular, how they search early in their professional life (incoming students) compared with search strategies used in advanced career stages (faculty). In addition, how does computer literacy change their search behavior? Based on Peter Pirolli and Wai-Tat Fu's user-tracing architecture (SNIF-ACT: A Model of Information Foraging on the World Wide Web. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on User Modeling, Johnstown, PA) we try to answer the following questions: (1) Can we create a detailed cognitive model of the search behavior of dental professionals based on computer literacy assessment and professional experience using the SNIF-ACT approach? (2) If (1) is successful, can we use such a cognitive model to evaluate the efficiency of an educational intervention, such as the AH online course developed at the Center for Dental Informatics? (3) If (1) is successful, can we use the cognitive model to improve our understanding of how dental professionals find, make sense of and use information to improve the developed AH online course? |
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Project Funding: |
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Please send comments to: Robert J. Weyant, DMD, DrPH: rjw1@pitt.edu
Division of Pediatric and Developmental Dental Sciences School of Dental Medicine University of Pittsburgh