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Background: Studies suggest that the process of patient consent to clinical trials is sub-optimal. Participant information sheets are important but can be technical and lengthy documents. Performance-based readability testing is an established means of assessing patient information, and this study aimed to test its application to participant information for a Phase 3 trial. Methods: An independent groups design was used to study the User Testing performance of the participant information sheet from the Phase 3 'Poor Responders' trial of In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF). 20 members of the public were asked to read it, then find and demonstrate understanding of 21 ...

Objective: The goal of this study was to compare prose and pictorial-based information pamphlets about the medication methotrexate in the domains of free recall, cued recall, comprehension and utility. Methods: A single blind, randomized trial of picture versus prose-based information pamphlets including 100 participants aged 18–65 years of age, who had not completed high school, could read English, and had no prior knowledge about methotrexate. Superiority of pamphlet type was assessed using immediate free recall, cued recall and comprehension. Results: There were no differences between picture and prose pamphlets in free recall, cued recall, and comprehension either immediately or after a 1-week interval. ...

In multimedia instruction, computer graphics play an important role in helping students interpret and understand scientific concepts. This paper reports a study of how different visual treatments (no graphics, still graphics, animated graphics) influenced 135 students with different prior knowledge levels (high, low) in learning procedural and descriptive knowledge. It was found that in the low prior-knowledge group, both still graphic and animation treatments were better than the control in learning descriptive facts (p < 0.05); while in the high prior-knowledge group, only the animation group was better than the control in learning descriptive facts (p < 0.05). In learning procedural knowledge, no significant ...

This study addresses the question of how problem-solution structures influence the processing of persuasive texts. In Experiment 7, 48 students read ads containing problem, solution, and company information on a computer. The position of the company information was varied: It came either before the problem and solution, between those two parts, or after them. Ads starting with problem information received more attention than ads starting with company information. The company information received less attention only when it came last. In experiment 2, 216 students read one ad. They recognized the company information better when it was positioned first. Furthermore, they ...

Side effects for prescription drugs vary in their severity and frequency of occurrence. Understanding the status of a given drug on both these dimensions is important for physicians during the prescribing process, for regulators and industry in the approval and safety review process, and for patients in the compliance process. There is a wide variety of terms used to describe severity and frequency information in both professional information sources (such as the approved label) and patient sources (such as pharmacy leaflets). The experiments reported here examine how people understand these terms, whether laypersons interpret them in the same ways as ...

In this article we describe an integrated view of home page structure for recall of information being a powerful concept for the users in information retrieval. We present the results of an experiment investigating the role of structured information in the recall of titles and sub-titles of the site map. We compare the recall of text information of the home page in terms of their hierarchical order at different levels, ascending / descending order, total number of headings recall and total number of levels recall and total possible hierarchical order pages using two types of the Web pages differing in ...

Investigated the relation between referential and causal coherence in discourse comprehension and some of the factors that affect children's ability to establish both. In 5 experiments, the ability of 36 1st graders, 36 4th graders, and 36 college adults to make causal inferences that explain how an unexpected and inconsistent outcome follows from an initial premise event in a story was examined. Textual factors that help establish referential continuity and link the inconsistent premise and outcome sentences were distinguished from propositional factors that help invite a particular causal inference that resolves the inconsistency. Results suggest that referential and causal coherence ...

Investigated the relation between referential and causal coherence in discourse comprehension and some of the factors that affect children's ability to establish both. In 5 experiments, the ability of 36 1st graders, 36 4th graders, and 36 college adults to make causal inferences that explain how an unexpected and inconsistent outcome follows from an initial premise event in a story was examined. Textual factors that help establish referential continuity and link the inconsistent premise and outcome sentences were distinguished from propositional factors that help invite a particular causal inference that resolves the inconsistency. Results suggest that referential and causal coherence ...

Investigated the relation between referential and causal coherence in discourse comprehension and some of the factors that affect children's ability to establish both. In 5 experiments, the ability of 36 1st graders, 36 4th graders, and 36 college adults to make causal inferences that explain how an unexpected and inconsistent outcome follows from an initial premise event in a story was examined. Textual factors that help establish referential continuity and link the inconsistent premise and outcome sentences were distinguished from propositional factors that help invite a particular causal inference that resolves the inconsistency. Results suggest that referential and causal coherence ...

Investigated the relation between referential and causal coherence in discourse comprehension and some of the factors that affect children's ability to establish both. In 5 experiments, the ability of 36 1st graders, 36 4th graders, and 36 college adults to make causal inferences that explain how an unexpected and inconsistent outcome follows from an initial premise event in a story was examined. Textual factors that help establish referential continuity and link the inconsistent premise and outcome sentences were distinguished from propositional factors that help invite a particular causal inference that resolves the inconsistency. Results suggest that referential and causal coherence ...