Children's roles using keyword search interfaces at home

Abstract

Children want to find information about their world, but there are barriers to finding what they seek. Young people have varying abilities to formulate complex queries and comprehend search results. Challenges in understanding where to type, confusion about what tools are available, and frustration with how to parse the results page all have led to a lack of perceived search success for children 7-11 years old. In this paper, we describe seven search roles children display as information seekers using Internet keyword interfaces, based on a home study of 83 children ages 7, 9, and 11. These roles are defined not only by the children's search actions, but also by who influences their searching, their perceived success, and trends in age and gender. These roles suggest a need for new interfaces that expand the notion of keywords, scaffold results, and develop a search culture among children.

A preliminary study using PageFetch to examine the searching ability of children and adults

“…Over-16s also played around 10 games on average, and produced more queries per game than under16s. These usage statistics suggest that adults are capable of forming search queries much more quickly than children -this is consistent with previous findings [3]. Also, younger children were inclined to play more games of PageFetch each than adults were suggesting that the incentive or the design of the game was appealing.…”

“…When considering the results of each experiment, users were divided into three age brackets -under-12s, 12 -16 year olds, and over-16s. These brackets were based on previous groupings used in children's information retrieval studies [3,5]. Table 4 provides a summary of the usage statistics for the di↵erent age groups.…”

“…However, to undertake such a study another challenge needs to be overcome. In a study conducted by Druin et al [3], it was found that many children are often uninterested in searching for information online or are only interested in searching for information that is relevant to their personal interests in an experimental setting. Consequently, children who were unmotivated were the least successful in completing information retrieval tasks given by the study.…”

Cooperative Inquiry revisited: Reflections of the past and guidelines for the future of intergenerational co-design

“…When designing for the ubiquity of search in our own foray into studying children's search practices on the internet [15,23], we discovered that in-context design and testing is crucial. Children search in their home or school environments, not in contrived lab settings.…”

How Different are Preferences of Children and Adults on Web Pages?

“…Based on the result, he claimed that the system design suitable for children and Web training are important because children have difficulty in keyword searching. Druin et al [3] conducted a home study of 83 children using Web search engines. As the result, they found that children can be classified into seven groups in terms of their searching activities, e.g., children who are familiar with PCs and succeed in search, and children who have a strong motivation in search but fail it.…”