This study investigated students’ oral performance ability accounting for various oral analytical factors including fluency, lexical and structural complexity and accuracy with each subcategory. Accordingly, 20 raters scored the oral performances produced by 200 students and a quantitative design using a MANOVA test was used to investigate students’ score differences of various levels of langua...

The use of Inhabited Virtual Environments (IVEs), is growing very quickly and people demand easier and more believable ways to interact in these new sites [3] [4], [5], [10], [13]. We understand by IVE a special kind of 3D virtual environments inhabited by avatars, which are the representation either of real humans users of the IVE or autonomous agents. From the point of view of software engine...

Even though the importance of Web applications is still increasing, design practice in this area is still mainly based on informal techniques and methods. Currently, few descriptive techniques are available to support web modeling and in practice, it is unusual to model web applications even though modeling is usually the corner stone of “classical” computer applications. Models not only formal...

Many task models, task analysis methods, and supporting tools have been introduced in the literature and are widely used in practice. With this comes need to understand their scopes and their differences. This chapter provides a thorough review of selected, significant task models along with their method and supporting tools. For this purpose, a meta-model of each task model is expressed as an ...

The design of organizations or other coordination mechanisms for groups of computational agents, either interacting with one another or with people, depends crucially on the task environment of which they are a part. Such dependencies include the structure of the environment (the particular kinds and patterns of interrelationships that occur between tasks) and the uncertainty in the environment...

Work psychologists have introduced a concept, in which dialog design is a part of task design. A set of criteria of user-oriented dialog design is presented here. These criteria are consistently integrated into a control concept. Empirical investigations on some of these criteria are then described. In an experiment to prove the criteria transparency , a desktop interface (high transparency) an...

Design problem solving is a complex activity involving a number of subtasks and a number of alternative methods potentially available for each subtask. The structure of tasks has been a key concern of recent research in task-oriented methodologies for knowledge-based systems (Chandrasekaran 1986; Clancey 1985; Steels 1990; McDermott 1988). One way to conduct a task analysis is to develop a task...

Task-level control problems are ones that involve significant coordination of planning, perception and action. Robot systems capable of performing complex tasks are typically composed of many concurrent components. The design problem is to develop a control system that safely and reliably achieves its given tasks. We focus on two aspects of this problem: eliminating unwanted interactions amongs...