Mental models of the Internet

There’s a creepy guy on the other end at Google!: engaging middle school students in a drawing activity to elicit their mental models of Google

“…Studies seeking to elicit people's mental models have drawn on a range of data collection techniques, including direct observation of people interacting with a device and thinking aloud (e.g., Holman 2011;Li 2007;Norman 1983), interviews (e.g., Brandt and Uden 2003;Li 2007;Yan 2005;Zhang 2008a, b), and asking people to draw their understanding of a particular concept, process, or system (e.g., Denham 1993;Dinet and Kitajima 2011;Gray 1990;Papastergiou 2005;Rieh et al 2010;Thatcher and Greyling 1998;Westbrook 2006). The process of eliciting mental models through drawing has, in fact, not only been used as a data collection method for research purposes, but also as an instructional method by teachers who wish to learn about their students' understandings of a science concept and how these understandings evolve across time, while simultaneously facilitating their building of mental models through the process of drawing itself (Glynn 1997).…”

“…Holman (2011) elicited first-year University students' (aged 16-19) mental models of search engines and article databases by asking them to describe how they thought these tools returned results based on the terms they had input and to draw or diagram the connections between the terms they input and their relationships to the results that were retrieved. Thatcher and Greyling (1998) elicited University respondents' (including undergraduate students, postgraduates, academic staff, and administrative staff, but predominantly undergraduate students) mental models of the Internet by asking them to draw and annotate a sketch of how they thought the Internet is structured and how they thought it worked. These respondents were also asked to prepare a 1-paragraph explanation of their drawings.…”

“…She indicated that students' drawings rarely portrayed the structural underpinnings of the Internet, and tended to focus mostly on the user's computer and what he/she sees on the screen. Furthermore, several researchers found that older children (Denham 1993;Dinet and Kitajima 2011;Yan 2005Yan , 2006Yan , 2009 and/or those who were more experienced in using the Internet (Thatcher and Greyling 1998;Yan 2005Yan , 2009 tended to have more complete mental models. For example, Denham (1993) found that her older participants' (11-12 year-olds) drawings were more likely than those of her younger participants (9-10 year-olds) to demonstrate an awareness of the hidden processes between computer input and output.…”

Mental models for web objects: Where do users expect to find the most frequent objects in online shops, news portals, and company web pages?

“…Drawings and sketches have shown to be promising tools to assess people's conceptualizations or mental models (Denham, 1993;Kerr, 1990;Thatcher and Greyling, 1998). At the core of the online study was an application where users were able to construct their prototypical website with just a few clicks.…”

Undergraduate students' mental models of the Web as an information retrieval system

“…Because the concept is abstract and difficult to measure directly, evidence of mental models was often gleaned indirectly through participant observation and interviews. The existing research has examined characteristics of mental models, such as accuracy and completeness (Dimitroff, 1990;Zhang, 1998), their developmental phases (Katzeff, 1990), transfer of mental models between systems (Marchionini, 1986), mental models' effects on people's interaction with systems (Borgman, 1986;Muramatsu & Pratt, 2001), and factors that affect mental models'sophistication (Papastergiou, 2005;Otter & Johnson, 2000;Thatcher & Greyling, 1998). However, the fundamental questions, such as what elements constitute mental models, what relationships exist between the elements, and what forms mental models take, have received less attention in the current literature.…”