The impact of pragmalinguistic support on video-conferenced collaborative suggestion-giving task

This study explored the impact of pragmalinguistic support on L2 users’ suggestion-giving task performance. Data came from 12 pairs of L2 users in a Zoom-mediated university course. They collaboratively wrote suggestions for improvement in their peers’ lesson plans using Office 365. Six pairs received pragmalinguistic support, while the others wrote their suggestions on their own. Audio-recorded pair discussions were coded qualitatively, and the written suggestions were analyzed in terms of linguistic and pragmatic characteristics. The results showed that pragmalinguistic support encouraged the participants to engage more in language-related and task-related episodes. Also, their suggestions contained more diverse lexical downgraders and conventional suggestion-giving expressions. By contrast, those who wrote suggestions without pragmalinguistic support engaged more in pragmatic-related episodes, relying extensively on epistemic modal verbs (e.g., would). The findings indicate that pragmalinguistic support may help L2 users to better attend to task content and language, producing lexically and pragmatically richer output.

A Comparative Eye Tracking Study of Usability—Towards Sustainable Web Design

Websites are one of the most frequently used communication environments, and creating sustainable web designs should be an objective for all companies. Ensuring high usability is proving to be one of the main contributors to sustainable web design, reducing usage time, eliminating frustration and increasing satisfaction and retention. The present paper studies the usability of different website landing pages, seeking to identify the elements, structures and designs that increase usability. The study analyzed the behavior of 22 participants during their interaction with five different landing pages while they performed three tasks on the webpage and freely viewed each page for one minute. The stimuli were represented by five different banking websites, each of them presenting the task content in a different mode (text, image, symbol, graph, etc.).; the data obtained from the eye tracker (fixations location, order and duration, saccades, revisits of the same element, etc.), together with the data from the applied survey lead to interesting conclusions: the top, center and right sides of the webpage attract the most attention; the use of pictures depicting persons increase visibility; the scanpaths follow a vertical and horizontal direction; numerical data should be presented through graphs or tables. Even if a user's past experience influences their experience on a website, we show that the design of the webpage itself has a greater influence on webpage usability.

Rethinking the measurement of occupational task content

Which tasks workers perform in their jobs is critical for how technological change plays out in the labour market. This article critically reviews existing measures of occupational task content and makes the case for rethinking how this concept is operationalised. It identifies serious shortcomings relating to the theoretical content and the empirical implementation of existing measures. Based on survey data from European Union countries between 2000 and 2015, it then introduces novel measures of routine task intensity and task complexity at the International Standard Classification of Occupations 1988 two-digit level that address these shortcomings. The indices will contribute to a more theoretically informed understanding of technological change and benefit both labour economists and sociologists in investigating the nature of recent technological change. JEL Codes: J23, J24

PENGEMBANGAN DAN PENERAPAN KONTEN H5P PADA E-LEARNING BERBASIS LMS MENGGUNAKAN MOODLE

E-learning merupakan sebuah sistem yang memanfaatkan teknologi informasi dalam proses pembelajaran. Penerapan teknologi informasi dalam pembelajaran e-learning dengan menggunakan moodle yang dapat dimodifikasi untuk mempermudah proses pembelajaran dengan mengggunakan fitur H5P (konten interaktif). Konten interaktif (H5P) merupakan konten dan materi pembelajaran yang ada pada sistem e-learning LMS yang bertujuan untuk memudahkan semua orang membuat, membandingkan dan menggunakan kembali konten HTML5 interaktif. Tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah merancang sebuah konten interaktif yang menarik perhatian user dalam penggunaan e-learning serta membuat konten interaktif yang menarik dengan menggunakan metode Design Sprint model. Metode Design Sprint model memiliki proses sistematis untuk menghasilkan konten interaktif yang efektif untuk disajikan menggunakan teknologi informasi berbasis website pada portal e-learning. Pada penelitian ini, peneliti akan mengembangkan konten interaktif yang awalnya hanya berisi materi pembelajaran seperti ppt. Hasil pengembangan dan penerapan konten H5P pada e-learning berbasis LMS menggunakan moodle antara lain berfokus pada seberapa besar pemahaman user dalam pengguanan konten interaktif yang dikembangkan. Hasil pengujian menunjukan bahwa feedback atau hasil terhadap pengembangan dan penerapan konten H5P pada e-learning berbasis LMS menggunakan moodle mengenai materi yang dibuat secara online ditujukan dengan adanya peningkatan hasil task content interaktif video yakni lebih dominan daripada hasil task content interaktif book.

A look at the new job-task information in the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth

Using data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth 1979 and 1997, this article examines how the skill level and task content of U.S. jobs vary among workers born during the 1957–1964 and 1980–1984 periods. This article presents data on how job attributes vary by sex, race, Hispanic origin, and educational attainment as well as by performance on the Armed Forces Qualifying Test and type of occupation. It also examines the relationship between job attributes and wages.

Evolution of the Unified State Exam in History: Poems and Prose of Teachers' Practices

This paper investigates the effect of сonstructed-response items in the Unified State Exam (ESE) in History on exam’s validity and the threats to validity. The Unified State Exam is the primary high-stakes examination for Russian students. Despite playing a vital role as an achievement and an admission test, this exam’s validity has not been looked into. The evolution of this exam is distinctly marked by a growing change in the number and weight of constructed-response items, which might be affecting the validity of test results in many ways. The research was focused on interviews with 36 history experts. Thematic analysis of transcripts helped to identify three main threats to validity: faulty criteria, task content and expert bias. The paper presents these results along with recommendations on improving the test.

The Effects of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation on Dual-Task Interference Depend on the Dual-Task Content

Recently, some studies revealed that transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) reduces dual-task interference. Since there are countless combinations of dual-tasks, it remains unclear whether stable effects by tDCS can be observed on dual-task interference. An aim of the present study was to investigate whether the effects of tDCS on dual-task interference change depend on the dual-task content. We adopted two combinations of dual-tasks, i.e., a word task while performing a tandem task (word-tandem dual-task) and a classic Stroop task while performing a tandem task (Stroop-tandem dual-task). We expected that the Stroop task would recruit the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and require involvement of executive function to greater extent than the word task. Subsequently, we hypothesized that anodal tDCS over the DLPFC would improve executive function and result in more effective reduction of dual-task interference in the Stroop-tandem dual-task than in the word-tandem dual-task. Anodal or cathodal tDCS was applied over the DLPFC or the supplementary motor area using a constant current of 2.0 mA for 20 min. According to our results, dual-task interference and the task performances of each task under the single-task condition were not changed after applying any settings of tDCS. However, anodal tDCS over the left DLPFC significantly improved the word task performance immediately after tDCS under the dual-task condition. Our findings suggested that the effect of anodal tDCS over the left DLPFC varies on the task performance under the dual-task condition was changed depending on the dual-task content.