Academic Papers and Articles

These are papers and articles I’ve written as assignments. They haven’t been published. But they are very relevant to the UX field have contributed to my learning, which is why I’m including them here. This page talks about either the Introduction or the Abstract of each paper and the actual paper will be linked below.

Paper 1 - Cognitive Skills

We perform cognitive activities every day in our lives. These include all the activities which involve putting in a deliberate effort to perform a task. Along with this deliberate effort, a secondary process also goes on which monitors the primary task. This secondary process is known as ‘Metacognition’. Livingston (2003) says that Metacognition refers to those activities that involve active control over our primary cognitive activities. She says that even though metacognition is referred to as ‘Thinking about thinking’, it’ s not that simple. Flavell (1979) says that metacognition occurs through interactions between four classes, Metacognitive Knowledge, Metacognitive Experiences, Goals (Tasks), and Actions (Strategies). Metacognitive knowledge refers to the knowledge which is acquired about cognitive processes, and that can be used to control the cognitive processes. It can be further divided into knowledge of person, task or strategies Livingston (2003). Metacognitive experiences are conscious cognitive experiences that are related to any situation. Goals or tasks are the current objectives and Actions are the behaviors used to reach the goal Flavell (1979).

There is a lot of debate between metacognition and cognition which tries to define at what point can a strategy be referred to as a cognitive one and not a metacognitive one Livingston (2003). For e.g., if a lecture is not understood by a student, would it be considered cognitive or metacognitive. Livingston tries to explain this difference by saying that metacognitive activities are those which are used to ensure whether a goal has been achieved or not. Another debate is about the relation between metacognition and intelligence Sarac, Onder, Karakelle (2014). They say that many researchers believe that metacognition is a subcomponent of intelligence whereas some believe that they are not related at all. Sternberg refers to ‘Metacomponents’ as executive processes that control components, receive feedback from them, and make sure that the tasks are performed correctly (as cited in Livingston (2003)). Sternberg maintains that this ability is related to intelligence. In order to use the feedback appropriately and perform the necessary actions, Self-Regulation or Self-Assessment has to be metacognitively performed. It refers to the process of planning and monitoring of activities and using strategies to successfully accomplish goals. The remainder of the paper discusses in detail Self- Assessment and explains the process of Decision Making and its relation to Metacognition.

The paper can be found here (5 pages): Cognitive Skills

Paper 2 - Reliability of Usability Evaluations

Usability Evaluation or Usability Testing is a method to understand what people think and feel about the product. It often involves both quantitative and qualitative data Hughes (2011). Qualitative data is focused on people’s emotions and is referred to as formative testing whereas Quantitative data is more focused on numbers and statistics and is referred to as summative testing. Quantitative data is easier to obtain and understand as compared to qualitative data. This is because qualitative data contains people’s reactions and opinions about a product, which has to be analyzed and made sense of. An attribute of qualitative research or testing is reliability. Reliability is defined as ‘The degree to which the result of a measurement, calculation, or specification can be depended on to be accurate’. Thus, in the case of Usability Evaluation, reliability assesses the confidence with which the results of an evaluation can be assumed to represent the larger population, and not just the test sample Hughes (2011). However, there are certain problems associated with usability evaluation which might affect its reliability.

The paper can be found here (4 pages): Reliability of Usability Evaluations