previous
section  |
 |
next
section  |
There were several anomalies observed, the major one being the ambiguity in where to locate answers to the questions. By far the most common confusion was on the questions asking about energy production and the fishing industry. A substantial proportion of the subjects looked under "Environmental Characteristics" for the answers, although the intention was for them to look for economic information. The other questions where there were unanticipated problems were
• the question on fisheries asked about "marine catch". One subject (for whom English is a second language) wasn't sure whether "marine" meant "fishing" or "naval infantry"
• one subject looked for "common animal" under economics and agriculture, rather than under environmental characteristics as intended.
Another anomaly was that some subjects forgot to hit carriage return to move on to the next question once or twice during the actual experimental task, even though we attempted to emphasize this in training. They didn't take a long time to figure out that they needed to return, however, and it is our belief that this did not have a large effect on task time. Thus we retained the data for all the subjects.
Finally, we observed a wide variation in typing speeds. While this is partially addressed by having a sufficient sample size, approaches to reducing the amount of typing should be considered.