Influencing students' construction of personalised concept maps through the use of query expansion (QE) searching of the World Wide Web

Abstract

Despite the on-going development of search engines, users of the World Wide Web, including school and undergraduate students, still find searching for appropriate information problematic. Keener students may seek relevant information to help them to construct a better understanding of the various concepts within a taught subject. Unfortunately there is no guarantee that the information contained in the located documents is of sufficient educational quality; measured for example in terms of the information's usefulness, accuracy, relevancy, trustworthiness, level of language, completeness and status. In this research it is argued that a domain expert (perhaps in the form of a "web literate" subject tutor) has several major advantages over a school or undergraduate student when it comes to searching for relevant subject-related informatio