This paper presents the first systematic investigation into the search engine optimization practices of major contract cheating websites in the United States. From a business perspective, visibility in organic search engine results is considered one of the top client recruitment tools. The current understanding of student recruitment strategies by…

Purpose: Universities play an important role in the promotion and implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This study aims to examine the visibility of information about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on the websites of Spanish and major international universities, by means of a quantitative and qualitative analysis…

While geographic search filters exist, few of them are validated and there are currently none that focus on Germany. We aimed to develop and validate a highly sensitive geographic search filter for MEDLINE (PubMed) that identifies studies about Germany. First, using the relative recall method, we created a gold standard set of studies about…

People rely on the internet for easy access to information, setting up potential confusion about the boundaries between an individual's knowledge and the information they find online. Across four experiments, we replicated and extended past work showing that online searching inflates people's confidence in their knowledge. Participants who…

The control of information is embedded in the cultural politics and institutions that regulate access to information. In its most basic form, communication is a practice of enabling the exchange of information. Websites have become one of the primary ways that people access information; however, most of the access is mediated through search…

Interventions to promote students' source evaluations have used various methods designed for the classroom context. In the present study, we tested an approach that is easily adaptable to online courses, based on eye movement modelling examples (EMME), that is, short videos displaying an expert student's eye gaze while s/he reads multiple pages on…

The literature searches that are used to identify studies for inclusion in a systematic review should be comprehensively reported. This ensures that the literature searches are transparent and reproducible, which is important for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of a systematic review and re-running the literature searches when conducting an…

Introduction: The purpose of this study is to replicate a study from 2007, which found that student users trust in Google's ability to rank results more than in their own relevance judgements. Method: In a between-subjects experiment using eye-tracking methodology, participants (n=25) worked on search tasks where the results ranking on search…

This paper examines a sampling of messages available to potential teacher candidates when searching online and querying, "How do I become a teacher?" Methodology used was discourse analysis of online search results using critical questions informed by Ellsworth's (1997) notions of mode of address. Results reported here are from targeted…

Teacher images can impact numerous perceptions in educational settings, as well as through popular media. The portrayal of effective science teaching is especially challenging to specify, given the complex nature of science inquiry and other standards-based practices. The present study examined the litany of representations of science teachers…

The dissertation research explores an approach to automatic concept-based query expansion to improve search engine performance. It uses a network-based approach for identifying the concept represented by the user's query and is founded on the idea that a collection-specific association thesaurus can be used to create a reasonable representation of…

This study examines behavioral traits to determine what impact they have on average visit duration when interacting with a website, a major part of search engine and webpage performance metrics commonly reported in practice. A task-based design was created to examine participants' interaction with various websites containing a variety of media and…

The authors discuss the relationship between information seeking and epistemic beliefs--beliefs about the source, structure, complexity and stability of knowledge--in the context of collaborative information-seeking discourses. They further suggest that both information seeking, and epistemic cognition research agendas, have suffered from a lack…

Today's students increasingly engage in online environments, with ready access to digital resources and mobile technologies. While much of this activity is socially motivated, the internet is also a source of knowledge for students and frequently accessed for school assignments, projects and assessment purposes. As mathematics continues to be…

Background: Obesity presents major challenges to public health in the United States. Trials of web-based interventions for weight control suggest that the Internet is a promising option for program delivery. Purpose: This study sought consensus among experts regarding critical components of successful weight control and to systematically examine…