Zoekresultaten

The complexity and linguistic construction of jury instructions can inhibit jurors' ability to comprehend and apply the law. Study 1 analyzes questions asked by actual deliberating jurors in order to identify sources of juror misunderstanding in criminal pattern jury instructions. Instructions concerning "reasonable doubt," criminal "intent," the use of evidence concerning prior convictions, and the general duties of jurors, are selected for further investigation. Study 2 uses videotaped trial materials to pinpoint linguistic problems that confuse jurors and interfere with their abilities to accurately comprehend and apply the selected pattern jury instructions. Available knowledge concerning psycholinguistics is then applied to ...

Previous work on learning from text has demonstrated that although illustrated text can enhance comprehension, illustrations can also sometimes lead to poor learning outcomes when they are not relevant to understanding the text. This phenomenon is known as the seductive details effect. The first experiment was designed to test whether the ability to control one's attention, as measured by working memory span tasks, would influence the processing of a scientific text that contained seductive (irrelevant) images, conceptually relevant images, or no illustrations. Understanding was evaluated using both an essay response and an inference verification task. Results indicated that low working ...

An experiment compared readers' use of analogic & pictorial illustrations for understanding & remembering complex instructional text. High school students (N = 102) read procedural texts under six analogic & pictorial illustration conditions & attempted to apply the texts' content in an applied performance task. Two weeks later Ss were evaluated on their attempts to perform the same task from memory. Pictures proved helpful for both immediate performance & delayed performace. Analogy was helpful for delayed performance but only slightly more helpful on immediate performance. Results are discussed in terms of apparent functions of analogies & pictures. ...

Objective This study assesses the usability of three patient information leaflets and attempts to improve them while complying with the current EU regulations.Methods Three original leaflets were tested among 154 potential users. Every participant answered 15 scenario questions for one of the leaflets. The leaflets were subsequently redesigned based on the test results and evidence-based Document Design principles. The revised texts were tested among 164 participants.Results All three original leaflets suffered from usability problems, especially problems related to finding relevant information. On average, only 75% of the topics could be located. Comprehension of the information, once found, was around 90%. ...

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 ...

Written information prepared by doctors, specialists in abdominal surgery, was tested for comprehension on patients undergoing cholecystectomy, using the standard Cloze test procedure. At the same time, the patients were asked to describe in their own words all they knew about their illness and the treatment. The collected 150 patient narratives were analyzed, and a typical narrative for each educational level was selected based on average SMOG score, word count and sentence length. The patient-worded information was then tested for comprehension on new patients, selected from primary health care, using the same Cloze procedure as with doctor-developed information. Patient profile ...

In 3 experiments, 267 undergraduates whose reading ability was determined by the Davis Reading Test or their 12th-grade English marks read and recalled texts that varied in local (micro-) or global (macro-) processing difficulty. In Exp I, 10 theoretically derived text variables, 5 at the micro- and 5 at the macrolevel, successfully predicted comprehension efficiency scores. Micro- and macrovariables accounted for unique portions of the comprehension variance. For the technical prose passages, microvariables were better predictors of less skilled readers' performance, whereas macrovariables were better for skilled readers'. In Exps II and III, lexical and macrostructure difficulty were factorially combined; ...

Two experiments examined visual attention distribution in learning from text and pictures. Participants watched a 16-step multimedia instruction on the formation of lightning. In Experiment 1 (N = 90) the instruction was system-paced (fast, medium, slow pace), while it was self-paced in Experiment 2 (N = 31). In both experiments the text modality was varied (written, spoken). During learning, the participants' eye movements were recorded. Results from both experiments revealed that learners spent more time studying the visualizations with spoken text than those with written text. In written text conditions learners consistently started reading before alternating between text and visualization; moreover, they spent more ...

Study objective: To determine whether the addition of illustrations to discharge instructions improves patient comprehension. Design: Randomized, blinded, prospective study. A blinded investigator asked a series of questions designed to test the participant's comprehension of the discharge instructions. There were 10 possible correct responses. Setting: Emergency department of a rural Level I trauma center. Participants: Convenience sample of 101 patients discharged with the diagnosis of laceration. Interventions: Patients were randomly assigned to receive discharge instructions with (n=54) or without (n=47) illustrations. Results: The median number of correct responses was five. Patients with illustrations were 1.5 times more likely to choose ...

This study examined how 2 kinds of help when learning from text and pictures (mapping support and instructional guidance through prompts) influence the coherence formation process of integrating information into a mental model. It also explored spatial abilities and working memory span as potential moderators. In a computer-based setting, 84 university students learned botanical concepts under 1 of 4 different support conditions: mapping (numerical labels vs. highlighting) and prompting (given vs. not given). Posttests assessed cognitive load, confidence in learning, and knowledge. Results showed a complex interplay between the 2 kinds of help and an effect of metacognitive monitoring. Moreover, ...