A Study of Children’s Search Query Formulation Habits

Abstract

The strategies children use for digital information search in educational settings are rarely explored. Open questions remain on such fundamental issues as to which information-seeking strategies children employ, how they construct queries, and if the strategies that are taught are effective when using modern search engines. We conducted an observation study with school children to gain insights into these questions. As a result of this study, we identified query-creation and query-reformulation strategies that children use.

“Computer what's your favourite colour?” children's information‐seeking strategies in the classroom

“…Given the speed of technology evolution, much of the existing research into children's information seeking and use is somewhat dated, and very few investigations into children's information seeking have appeared in the last 5 years. Among the more recent works, we find researchers have investigated children's search performance on commercial search engine interfaces designed for children (Jochmann-Mannak, Huibers, Lentz, & Sanders, 2010;Vanderschantz & Hinze, 2017) as well as on research led search user interfaces for children (Gossen, Nitsche, & Nürnberger, 2012;Vanderschantz & Hinze, 2018), and in the home (e.g., Druin, Foss, Hutchinson, Golub, & Hatley, 2010), but little education or classroom based investigations of what and how children are interacting with technologies.…”

Designing an Internet Search Interface for Children

“…An interaction model should support users during their use of the system and should align with the user"s mental model of how the system should work. Our interaction model is based on findings from interviews with NZ teachers and children (Vanderschantz et al, 2014b) and has been confirmed with observations of NZ children using Google (Vanderschantz & Hinze, 2017). Here we describe our interaction model by means of a conceptual wireframe design.…”

“…The Related Searches offered by the search engine were seldom used by children in those studies. We also observed children having difficulty identifying which page they would like to visit and which pages they had already visited when reviewing a search engine results page list (Vanderschantz & Hinze, 2017). It was observed that children were unsure where factual information displayed in pull-boxes or sidebars on ISE"s came from and this compounded the effect of mistakenly visiting a website several times.…”

“…The "I"m Feeling Lucky" button was considered counter to the goals of this research as it did not encourage the use of Questions, did not facilitate the opportunity for query or topic expansion, nor did it encourage search results list triage and decision making. Additionally, in our study of Google described in (Vanderschantz & Hinze, 2017) we did not see this button used by participants. Therefore, this button was removed from the interface and the search button made bigger and centred below the 9 search box.…”

“…We observed children (Vanderschantz & Hinze, 2017) searching the internet and identified issues with search query formulation and query reformulation. In Vanderschantz & Hinze (2017) we showed that children reformulated their search queries less often when they used natural language queries. Question based natural language queries were the most successful and align to the inquirybased learning common in NZ classrooms.…”