Abstract:
Working with course catalogs, the DAPR system, the course shopping cart, and the course request system is confusing for most students. With these resources it is difficult for students to make good decisions about which courses to enroll in, the order in which to take a sequence of courses, which minor to choose, and to which major or option to switch. CurricVis is a system that utilizes curriculum visualizations to help students build more accurate mental models of curricular programs, allowing them to make more informed curricular decisions.The purpose of the study was to measure the effects a curriculum visualization tool has on students' abilities to make decisions. We compared those findings with the effects of using only traditional, text-based curricular data. The hypotheses tested in this study were: students build more feasible plans with the aid of the curriculum visualization tool; students are more confident about their decisions with the tool; and students make their decisions more quickly with the tool. This study shows that CurricVis functions as a positive aid to the decision making process among students. No other research on curriculum visualization has included such a study on usability.
