UC Riverside

There are a range of educational web-based resources available for use by education professionals. Although widely available, such web resources vary in terms of usability. As of 2022, there was no way to assess whether these web resources are useful for educators in terms of identifying new classroom interventions to implement. In response, the Usage Rating Profile-Web Resource (URP-WR) was designed to measure the usability of educational web resources. Given this intended use of the URP-WR, this dissertation evaluates how potential users actually use information from the URP-WR to make decisions about an intervention web resource. Two groups of potential users were included in this study: pre-service teachers (n = 37) and doctoral students (n = 33) to allow for comparisons of decisions of use. First, participants were asked if they would be willing to implement a new intervention designed to improve their teaching. Participants were then asked to rank the factors that they prioritized from 1-5 with 1 being most influential and 5 being least influential to their decision making. Participants were provided these questions five times accompanying five presentations of data (i.e., Scenarios). The five scenarios were designed to represent five possible website types that participants may encounter: (a) high on all five factors of the URP-WR, (b) low on all five factors, (c) medium on all five factors, (d) high on credibility, low on appearance, accessibility, feasibility, and system support (e) low on credibility, high on appearance, accessibility, feasibility, and system support. Participants were asked to respond narratively to the question “Thinking back to all five scenarios, why did you rank the factors in the way that you did?” Results suggest that pre-service teachers are more likely than doctoral students to endorse intervention uptake in situations where data do not support usefulness of factors as well as when data support all factors but credibility. Participants largely agreed that credibility information from the URP-WR was most influential to their decision to use the web resource intervention, while appearance and system support were least influential. Implications, limitations, and future directions of the URP-WR are discussed.