Characterizing and Exploring Users' Task Completion Process at Different Stages in Learning Related Tasks

摘要

This study explored user interactions when accomplishing learning related tasks from a new perspective, the process perspective, and examined three main types of user interactions: searching, reading and writing behaviors. The goal is to characterize how users' searching, reading, and writing interactions change at different stages, and explore what contextual factors are related to the task completion process. A user experiment with thirty-two participants was conducted, and each participant was asked to work on two types of learning tasks: receptive tasks and critical tasks. For data analysis, we calculated the percentage of searching time, reading time and writing time during four stages, to characterize users' task completion process. Our results demonstrated that users' reading efforts were evenly distributed at four stages; half of their searching efforts were devoted at the first stage and writing efforts were mainly spent at the last stage. In addition, we also found task type and users' cognitive style had significant effects on users' searching, reading, writing process, and their writing efforts in the first stage were correlated to the quality of learning outcome. This study took the process perspective to characterize user interactions at different stages, and this perspective provides us a more comprehensive picture of user interactions and has implications for the design of search systems to fully support user interactions and their task completion process.