With a Little Help from My Friends: Use of Recommendations at School

In this exploratory paper, we study the usage of recommendations by and for children (ages 9 to 11) in an educational setting. From our preliminary analysis, it becomes apparent that recommender systems (RS) could provide extra support to and help children successfully complete inquiry tasks. Nonetheless, children have difficulty in recognizing the role of RS, in terms of aiding information discovery for classroom assignments. Findings from our study set a foundation that can inform future design and development of RS for children that support classroom-related work

Children on ChatGPT Readability in an Educational Context:Myth or Opportunity?

In this work, we present the results of a preliminary exploration aiming to understand whether the use of ChatGPT in an educational context can be an asset to meet the specific needs of the students. In particular, we focus on the possibility of adapting the responses to online inquiries related to the primary school curriculum to meet the expectations of readers with different literacy levels. The analysis of feedback elicited from children (9- to 10-year-olds) in three 4th grade classrooms indicates that ChatGPT can adapt its responses to the 4th grade level. However, it still needs improvement to reach the right level of readability. Outcomes from this work can inspire future research directions involving technologies like ChatGPT to adapt learning paths to suit a broad range of students with varied cognitive skills. The potential of such tools to support teachers in their effort to adapt to individual learning needs is still to be fully exploited. Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Web Information System

Here, There, and Everywhere: Building a Scaffolding for Children’s Learning Through Recommendations

Reading and literacy are on the decline among children. This is compounded by the fact that children have trouble with the discovery of resources that are appropriate, diverse, and appealing. With technology becoming an evermore presence in children’s lives, tools that can minimize choice overload and ease access to online resources become a must. A powerful but underutilized tool in regards to children that could assist in this situation is a recommender system (RS). We posit that RS could be used to impact children’s learning, using them to not only suggest what children might like but what they need in regards to learning. At the same time, if scoped inappropriately, outcomes from RS could be used to alter children’s outlook. The goal instead is to strive for RS that offer suggestions based off children’s evolving knowledge, preferences, reading level, etc., so that with the proper intervention from an expert-in-the-loop (e.g., parents/teachers) could impact not only children’s educational performance, but help them to reach the goal of learning to learn

Where a Little Change Makes a Big Difference:A Preliminary Exploration of Children’s Queries

This paper contributes to the discussion initiated in a recent SIGIR paper describing a gap in the information retrieval (IR) literature on query understanding–where they come from and whether they serve their purpose. Particularly the connection between query variability and search engines regarding consistent and equitable access to all users. We focus on a user group typically underserved: children. Using preliminary experiments (based on logs collected in the classroom context) and arguments grounded in children IR literature, we emphasize the importance of dedicating research efforts to interpreting queries formulated by children and the information needs they elicit. We also outline open problems and possible research directions to advance knowledge in this area, not just for children but also for other often-overlooked user groups and contexts.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Web Information System

Say It with Emojis: Co-Designing Relevance Cues for Searching in the Classroom

Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) include snippets of retrieved resources as a means to help searchers select the ones that satisfy their information needs. This way, result relevance can be determined by scanning through snippets, an exercise that requires experience with reading, understanding, and assessing the value of a document. These are skills that primary school children are still developing and thus are not yet proficient with. As web search tools are essential to support children learning at school and home, we explore how to help young searchers in making informed relevance assessments while conducting searches in a classroom. In this paper, we describe a collaborative design exercise involving primary school children as co-designers: we asked them to examine interfaces with combinations of different emojis to help them assess the usefulness of results in SERP–a crucial factor to determine relevance for the classroom. This activity made our child experts engage with the design exercise while enabling us to collect their judgments so as to get a better sense of the user requirements for this age group. Here we discuss the main design issues emerging from the analysis of children’s preferences, the rationale behind them, comments and concerns raised, and alternative proposals children sketched