Holistic reviews are a common practice employed by universities in the USA to make admissions decisions. It is an individualized review process where reviewers assess an applicant's potential by considering various criteria including academic metrics, adversities faced, and personal attributes. While the factors considered in such reviews are broadly known, a detailed walk-through of the process is absent in existing literature. This is important to understand what is done in practice and to identify opportunities for technological interventions to support the complex and changing process. We employed cognitive task analysis and a socio-organizational approach to understand the holistic review process at a highly-selective, private university. We found the process to be nuanced and complex owing its complexity both to the numerous variables involved and the reviewers' thought processes. We present a rigorous, structured characterization of the review process and suggest possible leverage points for applying visualization decision-support tools.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of previously co-located information workers had to work from home, a trend expected to become much more commonplace in the future. We interviewed 53 information workers from 17 U.S. teams to understand how this unique extended work-from-home setting influenced teamwork and how they adapted to it. Using a grounded theory approach, we discovered that extended remote work highlighted diversity in team members' home-lives and daily work rhythms. Whereas these types of diversity played only marginal roles for teams in the co-located office, they had a more tangible impact in the work-from-home setting, from coordination delays and interruptions to conflicts related to workload fairness, miscommunication, and trust. Importantly, workers reported that their teams adapted to these challenges by setting explicit norms and standards for online communication and asynchronous collaboration and by promoting general social and situational awareness. We discuss computer-supported designs to help teams manage these latent diversities in an extended remote teamwork setting.
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