Undergraduates Have Difficulty Distinguishing Formats Based on Discovery Tool Search Results
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A Review of: Gewirtz, S. R., Novak, M., & Parsons, J. (2014). Evaluating the intersection between WorldCat Local and student research. Journal of Web Librarianship, 8(2), 113-124. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19322909.2014.877312 Abstract Objective – To evaluate the usability of WorldCat Local for undergraduate students conducting research. Design – Usability study. Setting – Two small, liberal arts colleges in central Minnesota. Subjects – 13 undergraduates (7 females and 6 males). Methods – To simulate an authentic research process, researchers created a thesis statement and a list of materials students needed to find using WorldCat Local. The students were video recorded and instructed to use the “think aloud” protocol as they worked through the list of materials to find. Researchers analyzed the recordings and evaluated the efficiency of the students’ searching processes using a rubric with scores from 1 to 5. Main Results – Students were able to find books relevant to their topic, but had difficulty in identifying a book that their college library did not own. Students had more difficulty finding current scholarly journal articles and encyclopedias. Additionally, students had trouble distinguishing different formats in the results list. Conclusion – The WorldCat Local results interface confused students, especially when they tried to determine the types of materials found (e.g., article, book, etc.). The students showed little understanding of relevance sorting and facets, although they did attempt to use them while searching. Despite the difficulties, the colleges will keep WorldCat Local as their discovery tool while exploring alternative options. The researchers suggest the need for future research to confirm their findings and determine what changes to the discovery tool interface would be most beneficial for the users.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.116 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.013 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".