Benefits and Risks of Emphasis Adaptation in Study Workflows

This paper looks at the effect of highlighting in a study plan, represented as a workflow with prerequisites. We compare the effectiveness of highlighting when the adaptation was correct (participants responded quicker and more correctly), and when it did not highlight the most relevant tasks (detrimental effect). False statements took longer to process than positive statements (deciding about things that were not in the plan), but also surprisingly had lower error rates than positive statements. These findings imply that when the system makes errors in the adaptation this is harmful, and may cause students to incorrectly believe that they do not need to do certain tasks.