Collecting responses through Web page drag and drop

• Published in: Behavior research methods, instruments, & computers Vol. 36; no. 1; pp. 52 - 68
• Main Authors: Britt, M Anne, Gabrys, Gareth
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 01.02.2004
• Subjects: Computer-Assisted Instruction - instrumentation; Computer-Assisted Instruction - methods; Data Collection - methods; Generalization (Psychology); Humans; Internet - instrumentation; Programming Languages; Psychology, Experimental - methods; Software; Surveys and Questionnaires; User-Computer Interface
• ISSN: 0743-3808; 1532-5970
• DOI: 10.3758/BF03195549

This article describes how to collect responses from experimental participants using drag and drop on a Web page. In particular, we describe how drag and drop can be used in a text search task in which participants read a text and then locate and categorize certain elements of the text (e.g., to identify the main claim of a persuasive paragraph). Using this technique, participants respond by clicking on a text segment and dragging it to a screen field or icon. We have successfully used this technique in both the argument element identification experiment that we describe here and a tutoring system that we created to teach students to identify source characteristics while reading historical texts (Britt, Perfetti, Van Dyke, & Gabrys, 2000). The implementation described here exploits the capability of recent versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser to handle embedded XML documents and drag and drop events.