Citizens regularly search the Web to make informed decisions on daily life questions, like online purchases, but how they reason with the results is unknown. This reasoning involves engaging with data in ways that require statistical literacy, which is crucial for navigating contemporary data. However, many adults struggle to critically evaluate and interpret such data and make data-informed decisions. Existing literature provides limited insight into how citizens engage with web-sourced information. We investigated: How do adults reason statistically with web-search results to answer daily life questions? In this case study, we observed and interviewed three vocationally educated adults searching for products or mortgages. Unlike data producers, consumers handle pre-existing, often ambiguous data with unclear populations and no single dataset. Participants encountered unstructured (web links) and structured data (prices). We analysed their reasoning and the process of preparing data, which is part of data-ing. Key data-ing actions included judging relevance and trustworthiness of the data and using proxy variables when relevant data were missing (e.g., price for product quality). Participants’ statistical reasoning was mainly informal. For example, they reasoned about association but did not calculate a measure of it, nor assess underlying distributions. This study theoretically contributes to understanding data-ing and why contemporary data may necessitate updating the investigative cycle. As current education focuses mainly on producers’ tasks, we advocate including consumers’ tasks by using authentic contexts (e.g., music, environment, deferred payment) to promote data exploration, informal statistical reasoning, and critical web-search skills—including selecting and filtering information, identifying bias, and evaluating sources.
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Learning teams in higher education executing a collaborative assignment are not always effective. To remedy this, there is a need to determine and understand the variables that influence team effectiveness. This study aimed at developing a conceptual framework, based on research in various contexts on team effectiveness and specifically team and task awareness. Core aspects of the framework were tested to establish its value for future experiments on influencing team effectiveness. Results confirmed the importance of shared mental models, and to some extent mutual performance monitoring for learning teams to become effective, but also of interpersonal trust as being conditional for building adequate shared mental models. Apart from the importance of team and task awareness for team effectiveness it showed that learning teams in higher education tend to be pragmatic by focusing primarily on task aspects of performance and not team aspects. Further steps have to be taken to validate this conceptual framework on team effectiveness.
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A substantial amount of studies have addressed the influence of sound on human performance. In many of these, however, the large acoustic differences between experimental conditions prevent a direct translation of the results to realistic effects of room acoustic interventions. This review identifies those studies which can be, in principle, translated to (changes in) room acoustic parameters and adds to the knowledge about the influence of the indoor sound environment on people. The review procedure is based on the effect room acoustics can have on the relevant quantifiers of the sound environment in a room or space. 272 papers containing empirical findings on the influence of sound or noise on some measure of human performance were found. Of these, only 12 papers complied with this review's criteria. A conceptual framework is suggested based on the analysis of results, positioning the role of room acoustics in the influence of sound on task performance. Furthermore, valuable insights are pre- sented that can be used in future studies on this topic. Whi le the influence of the sound environment on performance is clearly an issue in many situations, evidence regarding the effectiveness of strategies to control the sound environment by room acoustic design is lacking and should be a focus area in future studies.
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