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Geske successfully defends dissertation for Ph.D.By Lori Runkle
Associate Professor Joel Geske’s hours of hard work in Hamilton Hall’s Physiomedia Lab were reflected in the “full pass” with customary corrections and edits that he received after his dissertation defense on Nov. 10. “It’s persistence, persistence, persistence” and “jumping through hoops,” the advertising professor commented about the dissertation process. The advice he gave others in Ph.D. programs is “get some time off from a full-time job. Don’t give up. It gets done eventually.” Geske will receive his Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction technology through ISU's College of Human Sciences. Titles of dissertations must be accurate and succinct. That is why Geske said the title of his dissertation, “A Comparison of Reading on Computer Screen and Print Media: Measurement of Attention Patterns Using EEG” went through three permutations. But, he said the title now reflects the essence of his research. The idea for his research came from watching students working in computer labs in the mid-1990s. While teaching his courses, Geske would assign students to read longer and more challenging academic articles online. “Students would print the articles out,” he said. When Geske asked why they didn’t read the articles on the computer screen, students said they couldn't comfortably read them. “What exactly did they mean?” and “Why couldn’t they read the articles on the screen?” were two questions that led Geske to his interest in the readability of type on paper, on a cathode-ray tube (CRT) display and on a screen with a liquid crystal display (LCD). The CRT is a display device that has been used in many computer displays, video monitors and television sets. According to Geske, the CRT emits flickers of light that cause some people to have problems concentrating, reading and performing tasks. The LCD, on the other hand, does not produce the same flicker effect. Geske measured his research subjects' attention while using the three formats. He found subjects pay more attention to the LCD display than the CRT display. “Whenever there is a flicker effect, people pay less attention,” he said. Geske received the Iowa State University Research Award for his Ph.D. research. The award honors students whose research accomplishments are among the top 10 percent at Iowa State in overall quality. Saras Bellur, a graduate student studying journalism and mass communication, has been working with Geske since fall 2004. She said measuring how the brain, body and mind respond to different media is a lifetime’s work. According to Bellur, the equipment in the Physiomedia Lab “… gives us a holistic picture of what is happening. The immediacy of the responses shows us how the brain, body and mind react to different media. The way you read on a computer screen is not the way you read a book.” Geske said the results of his research could be applied to both distance education and the media. In the field of distance education, faculty and students spend hours in front of computer screens. Many university courses are now taught completely online. Improving computer monitors and the display of information for scholarly eyes and brains would be a universally cheered innovation. My research may also impact how people “design the news with more pictures, captions, smaller bits of copy and more visual cues,” to assist people in processing the information, Geske said.
Last updated: Nov. 28, 2005 |
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