Sometimes the Internet reads the question wrong: children’s search strategies & difficulties

When children search for information on a given topic, how do they go about searching for and retrieving information? What can their information seeking strategies tell us about the development of search interfaces for children's digital libraries, search engines and information repositories? We interviewed New Zealand (NZ) school children to seek insights into how they are conducting information searches during their education

Understanding Children’s Help-Seeking Behaviors: Effects of Domain Knowledge

This dissertation explores children’s help-seeking behaviors and use of help features when they formulate search queries and evaluate search results in IR systems. This study was conducted with 30 children who were 8 to 10 years old. The study was designed to answer three research questions with two parts in each: 1(a) What are the types of help-seeking situations experienced by children (8-10 years old) when they formulate search queries in a search engine and a kid-friendly web portal?, 1(b) What are the types of help-seeking situations experienced by children (8-10 years old) when they evaluate search results in a search engine and a kid-friendly web portal?, 2(a) What types of help features do children (8-10 years old) use and desire when they formulate search queries in a search engine and a kid-friendly web portal?, 2(b) What types of help features do children (8-10 years old) use and desire when they evaluate search results in a search engine and a kid-friendly web portal?, 3(a) How does children’s (8-10 years old) domain knowledge affect their help seeking and use of help features when they formulate search queries in a search engine and a kid-friendly web portal?, 3(b) How does children’s (8-10 years old) domain knowledge affect their help seeking and use of help features when they evaluate search results in a search engine and a kid-friendly web portal? This study used multiple data collection methods including performance-based domain knowledge quizzes as direct measurement, domain knowledge self-assessments as indirect measurement, pre-questionnaires, transaction logs, think-aloud protocols, observations, and post-interviews. Open coding analysis was used to examine children’s help-seeking situations. Children’s cognitive, physical, and emotional types of help-seeking situations when using Google and Kids.gov were identified. To explore help features children use and desire when they formulate search queries and evaluate results in Google and Kids.gov, open coding analysis was conducted. Additional descriptive statistics summarized the frequency of help features children used when they formulated search queries and evaluated results in Google and Kids.gov. Finally, this study investigated the effect of children’s domain knowledge on their help seeking and use of help features in using Google and Kids.gov based on linear regression. The level of children’s self-assessed domain knowledge affects occurrences of their help-seeking situations when they formulated search queries in Google. Similarly, children’s domain knowledge quiz scores showed a statistically significant effect on occurrences of their help-seeking situations when they formulated keywords in Google. In the stage of result evaluations, the level of children’s self-assessed domain knowledge influenced their use of help features in Kids.gov. Furthermore, scores of children’s domain knowledge quiz affected their use of help features when they evaluated search results in Kids.gov. Theoretical and practical implications for reducing children’s cognitive, physical, and emotional help-seeking situations when they formulate search queries and evaluate search results in IR systems were discussed based on the results

A Child-Driven Metadata Schema: A Holistic Analysis of Children\u27s Cognitive Processes During Book Selection

The purpose of this study was to construct a child-driven metadata schema by understanding children\u27s cognitive processes and behaviors during book selection. Existing knowledge organization systems including metadata schemas and previous literature in the metadata domain have shown that there is a no specialized metadata schema that describes children\u27s resources that also is developed by children. It is clear that children require a new or alternative child-driven metadata schema. Child-driven metadata elements reflected the children\u27s cognitive perceptions that could allow children to intuitively and easily find books in an online cataloging system. The literature of development of literacy skills claims that the positive experiences of selecting books empower children\u27s motivation for developing literacy skills. Therefore, creating a child-driven metadata schema not only contributes to the improvement of knowledge organization systems reflecting children\u27s information behavior and cognitive process, but also improves children\u27s literacy and reading skills. Broader research questions included what metadata elements do children like to use? What elements should a child-driven metadata schema include? In order to answer these research questions, a triangulated qualitative research design consisting of questionnaires, paired think-aloud, interview, and diaries were used with 22 child participants between the ages of 6 and 9. A holistic understanding of the children\u27s cognitive processes during book selection as a foundation of a child-driven metadata schema displays an early stage of an ontological contour for a children\u27s knowledge organization system. A child-driven metadata schema constructed in this study is apt to include different metadata elements from those metadata elements existing in current cataloging standards. A child-driven metadata schema includes five classes such as story/subject, character, illustration, physical characteristics, and understandability, and thirty three metadata elements such as character\u27s names and images, book cover\u27s color, shape, textured materials, engagement element, and tone. In addition, the analysis of the relationship between emergent emotional vocabularies and cognitive factors and facets illustrated the important role of emotion and attention in children\u27s information processing and seeking behaviors

Youth as Design Partners: Age-Appropriate Websites for Middle and High School Students

This study explored the impact of using best practices identified in previous studies in designing age-appropriate websites for middle and high school youth. Utilizing a mixed-method approach, 31 middle and 22 high school youth took part in six focus groups across four states. Participants were introduced to a website specifically designed for either middle or high school youth, asked to discuss their overall opinions of content and interface design, and then asked to rate their overall first impressions of the site. Satisfaction ratings for both groups increased for each design iteration (high school from 6.2 to 8.0; middle school from 6.7 to 8.25) and the results validate previous findings that unique differences exist between middle and high school user preferences. ChiSquare tests (p=.05) suggest middle school website ratings increased significantly while high school website ratings, which improved, remained inconclusive. The implications of the study include a youth website design checklist for both middle and high school youth and the introduction of a new construct, concept actualization, which reflects the need for designers to shift from adult to youth oriented paradigms when designing digital environments through close collaboration between adult and youth designers

School Librarians and Web Usability: Why Would I Want to Use That?

The usability of a statewide curriculum website was evaluated involving 876 participants. Site usage differed based on user group and overall site content and relevance was found to be good along with high levels of satisfaction with graphic design. Usability problems with ease-of-use, however, were identified leading to the suggestion that many potential users do not use the site because of difficulty finding the information they are looking for. Implications of the research center on the articulation of a usability evaluation framework that could be generalized for testing the usability of other websites as well as redesign considerations for the site examined for the study

IRS, information services and LIS research - a reminder about affect and the affective paradigm… and a question

PURPOSE – A previous contribution (Fourie, 2013) argues in favour of a balance in emphasis between information communication technology (ICT); information retrieval systems (IRS) such as databases, library catalogues, repositories, Google Scholar, digital libraries, portals, search engines; and, the users of these systems. This contribution pursues the need to consider affect and an affective paradigm more prominently in the design, evaluation, promotion and use of IRS and library and information services (LIS). DESIGN / METHODOLOGY / APPROACH – The contribution is written against the background of research in information behaviour, user studies, systems design, and information literacy. FINDINGS – Although the literature from LIS and other disciplines notes an affective paradigm or even paradigms, it is not strongly positioned compared with the systems and cognitive paradigms. A growing body of research and work practices such as information representation and tagging, and information skills training, is taking a slant towards affect and emotion. The question, however, is whether current work is sufficient to argue for an affective paradigm complimentary to the systems, cognitive and socio-cognitive paradigms, and how an affective paradigm should be introduced in training/education for LIS. ORIGINALITY / VALUE – Although there are a number of publications on affect and emotion, and references to an affective paradigm, this contribution is aimed at stimulating thought on whether we should prominently introduce the affective paradigm into LIS curricula as preparation for adding more value to IRS, library services, and in dealing with emotion-laden jobs, and if so, how.http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?issn=0737-8831hb201

Designing Teenage Emotions with a Life of Their Own

In this chapter, two participatory design activities are described in which teenagers create lo-fi designs describing emotions and explain the rationale for their design choices. Designs annotating and describing emotions are categorised as anthropomorphic, abstract, object based, or biomorphic. The chapter concludes: (i) teenagers use a variety of visual metaphors to describe emotions, (ii) teenagers use anthropomorphic visual metaphors most often to describe emotions and (iii) teenagers make more use of abstract and biomorphic visual metaphors to describe ‘negative’ emotions. The effect of materials on designs is analysed, suggesting that teenagers are more likely to create designs describing emotions featuring anthropomorphic visual metaphors when using malleable three-dimensional materials. Suggestions are made for the use of externalisation and personification as part of interactive emotion displays within affective systems. A focus group evaluation of a prototype mobile app is described, which suggests that teenagers place more importance on an affective systems ability to support social relationships than they do its ability to support psychological development. This research will be of value to interaction designers and Child-Computer Interaction researchers seeking to understand how teenagers use different visual metaphors to describe different emotions

CHILDREN INFORMATION SEARCH ABILITY ON SEARCH ENGINE BASED ON SURVEY IN ACEH

This study discussed about children information search ability on search engine. This study isquantitative research and the instrument for this research developed by the researcher on basis of objectives and theoretical framework.The instrument of this research was questionnaires. The survey was conducted on November 2017, in Aceh, Indonesia. Total number of children were 300 who responded from three public elementary school. The result of this study describe children’s search ability on search engine.Keywords:Information search ability, Search Engine, Children,andAce

Designing Teenage Emotions with a Life of Their Own

In this paper two participatory design activities are described in which teenagers create lo-fi designs describing emotions and explain the rationale for their design choices. Designs annotating and describing emotions are categorised as anthropomorphic, abstract, object based, or biomorphic. The paper concludes that teenagers use a variety of visual metaphors to describe emotions, that teenagers use anthropomorphic visual metaphors the most to describe emotions and that teenagers make more use of abstract and biomorphic visual metaphors to describe 'negative' emotions. The effect of materials on designs is analysed, suggesting that teenagers are more likely to create designs describing emotions featuring anthropomorphic visual metaphors when using malleable threedimensional materials. Suggestions are made for the use of externalisation and personification as part of interactive emotion displays within affective systems. This research will be of value to interaction designers and Child Computer Interaction researchers seeking to understand how teenagers use different visual metaphors to describe different emotions. The contribution of this work is a categorisation of the visual metaphors teenagers use to express different emotions