Date of Graduation
1989
Document Type
Dissertation/Thesis
Abstract
Computers have become a significant part of many people's daily life. Accompanying this trend, more resources have been devoted to software training. American businesses alone spend over {dollar}1 billion dollars on training people to use computer software each year. Part of this cost might be reduced by devising more effective training. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to evaluate whether training effectiveness could be improved by manipulating one critical feature of training, the kind of prompting strategy used. Nine college students were trained to use a spreadsheet program with a complete-prompting method, which involves telling subjects what keys to press as they work through a spreadsheet task; ten students were trained with a fading method that progressively delays the prompt over trials (prompt delay); and nine students were trained with a fading method that progressively adds keypress choices to a command menu over trials (addition-of-choices). The results showed that subjects who were trained with complete prompting made twice as many errors on a post test as subjects who were trained with prompt delay or addition-of-choices. The traditional complete prompting should be replaced by prompt-fading and that could save millions of dollars each year.
Recommended Citation
Karlsson, Thorlakur, "A comparison of three prompt-fading methods in computer software training." (1989). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 9154.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/9154