SignificancePeople often make decisions with consequences that unfold over time. When facing such intertemporal choices, people use different search strategies. We examine how these search strategies differ and how they relate to patience in intertemporal choice. We demonstrate that search varies substantially across individuals and identify two main search strategies—comparative or integrative search. Importantly, comparative search correlates with greater patience and higher susceptibility to contextual influences on choice. We manipulated search using an unobtrusive technique, revealing a causal relationship between strategy and choice. Comparative searchers make more patient choices and exhibit larger framing effects than integrative searchers. An understanding of how differences in psychological processes change discounting can inform the design of behavioral interventions to improve consumer welfare.

BackgroundSocial Media, such as Yelp, provides rich information of consumer experience. Previous studies suggest that Yelp can serve as a new source to study patient experience. However, the lack of a corpus of patient reviews causes a major bottleneck for applying computational techniques.ObjectiveThe objective of this study is to create a corpus of patient experience (COPE) and report descriptive statistics to characterize COPE.MethodsYelp reviews about health care-related businesses were extracted from the Yelp Academic Dataset. Natural language processing (NLP) tools were used to split reviews into sentences, extract noun phrases and adjectives from each sentence, and generate parse trees and dependency trees for each sentence. Sentiment analysis techniques and Hadoop were used to calculate a sentiment score of each sentence and for parallel processing, respectively.ResultsCOPE contains 79,173 sentences from 6914 patient reviews of 985 health care facilities near 30 universities in the United States. We found that patients wrote longer reviews when they rated the facility poorly (1 or 2 stars). We demonstrated that the computed sentiment scores correlated well with consumer-generated ratings. A consumer vocabulary to describe their health care experience was constructed by a statistical analysis of word counts and co-occurrences in COPE.ConclusionsA corpus called COPE was built as an initial step to utilize social media to understand patient experiences at health care facilities. The corpus is available to download and COPE can be used in future studies to extract knowledge of patients’ experiences from their perspectives. Such information can subsequently inform and provide opportunity to improve the quality of health care.

In previous studies of homework in core academic subjects, positive student attitudes toward homework were linked to higher achievement, whereas time spent on homework showed an inconsistent relationship with achievement. This study examined the generalizability of these findings to foreign language learning by analyzing 2,342 adult students' attitudes toward assigned homework, time spent on assigned homework, and achievement outcomes in a variety of foreign language courses. Student ratings of the relevance of homework, the usefulness of feedback provided on homework, and the fairness of homework grading were positively correlated with teacher-assigned grades and standardized proficiency test scores in listening, reading, and speaking. Reported time spent on homework, however, was negatively correlated with these measures. In hierarchical regression analyses, all homework-related variables emerged as significant predictors of outcomes after controlling for potential covariates such as language learning aptitude, demographic variables, and affective factors. Thus, these results provide evidence that language course outcomes are positively associated with attitudes toward homework but negatively associated with time spent on homework. Possible interpretations of these findings are discussed. We suggest that the negative association follows in part from the opportunity cost of time spent on assigned homework, which decreases time spent on individualized study that may be more beneficial for improving language course outcomes.Keywords: assigned homework, attitudes, time spent, grade point average, standardized test scores Homework is nearly ubiquitous in educational settings, yet its effectiveness as a pedagogical tool is questioned to this day. In this article, we report results of the first study to examine the relationship of homework-related variables to achievement in foreign language (FL) courses. In doing so, this investigation responds to a problematic bias in education research toward examining achievement in core academic subjects (e.g., reading, math, science) to the exclusion of FLs. Although there is some evidence that homework is related positively to achievement in core subjects, FL achievement may not be influenced by homework in the same way because of two unique characteristics of language acquisition: a high degree of implicit learning (Eckman, Iverson, Fox, Jacewicz, & Lee, 2011;Williams, 2009) and social and interactional requirements (Burling, 1981;Gass, Mackey, & Pica, 1998;Kuhl, Tsao, & Liu, 2003;Long, 1981;Schumann, 1986;Seliger, 1977;Watanabe & Swain, 2007;Wells, 1981). Unlike that of other subjects, knowledge of language is largely unconscious; is routinely acquired without explicit instruction; and is inherently social, in that rules of conversation and cultural norms are fundamentally based in social interaction. Consequently, although traditional homework exercises done in isolation may aid in the learning of algebra, for example, it remains unclear whether this type of explicit, nonin...