This paper explores the search effectiveness of social tagging which allows the public to freely tag resources, denoted as keywords, with any words as well as to share personal opinions on those resources. Social tagging potentially helps users to organize, manage, and retrieve resources. Efficient retrieval can help users put more of their focus…

With the advancement of such Web 2.0 applications as weblogs, language learners have more opportunities to use a target language for communication purposes and to experience peer collaboration and interaction. In the search for ways to augment an EFL curriculum in which speaking practice is limited but the demand for improving oral proficiencies…

Image searches are now crucial for obtaining information, constructing knowledge, and building successful educational outcomes. We investigated how reading ability and Internet experience influence keyword-based image search behaviors and performance. We categorized 58 junior-high-school students into four groups of high/low reading ability and…

As knowledge rapidly expands and accumulates, training and assessing students' information searching ability for solving problems on the Internet has become an important and challenging issue. This research aims to improve the web-based problem solving abilities of primary school students by employing an information summarising approach for…

As the amount of information available in online digital libraries increases exponentially, questions arise concerning the most productive way to use that information to advance learning. Applying the earlier information seeking theories advocated by Kelly (1963), Taylor (1968), and Belkin (1980) to the digital libraries experience, Carol Kuhlthau…

The present study targeted the online reading strategies of upper-elementary and middle school students with and without learning disabilities in the U.S. and in Taiwan. Several aspects of the comprehension process were studied, including: (1) Internet navigation strategies and behaviours, (2) sensitivity to the organisational structure of…

This study examined 38 EFL senior high school students' "Yahoo!" online dictionary look-up behavior. In a language laboratory, the participants read an article on a reading sheet, underlined any words they did not know, looked up their unknown words in "Yahoo!" online bilingual dictionary, and wrote down the definitions of…

With the rapid development of wireless communication and sensor technologies, ubiquitous learning has become a promising solution to educational problems. In context-aware ubiquitous learning environments, it is required that learning content is retrieved according to environmental contexts, such as learners' location. Also, a learning content…

The purpose of this study was to investigate medical students' information commitments toward online web medical information. The sample consisted of 534 volunteer medical university students with internet experience from 6 medical universities in Taiwan. This study used the Information Commitment Survey (ICS) for an investigation of medical…

Past research has shown the variations of students' conceptions of learning, but little has been especially undertaken to address students' conceptions of web-based learning and to make comparisons between students' conceptions of learning in general and their conceptions of web-based learning in particular. By interviewing 83 Taiwanese college…

The main purpose of this study was to examine the structural relationships between scientific epistemological views (SEVs) and information commitments (ICs) of high school students in Taiwan. Data were collected from 486 Taiwanese high school students via two self-reporting instruments: one was the SEV questionnaire, including five scales for…

According to government reports, new Internet technologies present readers with new reading opportunities and challenges (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000; RAND Reading Study Group [RRSG], 2002). However, we are just beginning to understand the specific complexities that Internet text imposes on the reading…

We propose a computer-assisted cancellation test system (CACTS) to understand the visual attention performance and visual search strategies in school children. The main aim of this paper is to present our design and development of the CACTS and demonstrate some ways in which computer techniques can allow the educator not only to obtain more…

"Information commitments" include both a set of evaluative standards that Web users utilize to assess the accuracy and usefulness of information in Web-based learning environments (implicit component), and the information searching strategies that Web users use on the Internet (explicit component). An "Information Commitment…

Presents a query categorization approach to automatically classifying Web query terms into broad subject categories to provide in-depth analysis of users' search interests. Describes a test on search engine logs in Taiwan that shows the approach is efficient in dealing with large numbers of queries. (Author/LRW)