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Children’s query formulation and search result exploration

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Abstract

Our research aims at understanding children’s information search and their use of information search tools during educational pursuits. We conducted an observation study with 50 New Zealand school children between the ages of 9 and 13 years old. In particular, we studied the way that children constructed search queries and interacted with the Google search engine when undertaking a range of educationally appropriate inquiry tasks. As a result of this in situ study, we identified typical query-creation and query-reformulation strategies that children use. The children worked through 250 tasks, and created a total of 550 search queries. 64.4% of the successful queries made were natural language queries compared to only 35.6% keyword queries. Only three children used the related searches feature of the search engine, while 46 children used query suggestions. We gained insights into the information search strategies children use during their educational pursuits. We observed a range of issues that children encountered when interacting with a search engine to create searches as well as to triage and explore information in the search engine results page lists. We found that search tasks posed as questions were more likely to result in query constructions based on natural language questions, while tasks posed as instructions were more likely to result in query constructions using natural language sentences or keywords. Our findings have implications for both educators and search engine designers.

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Notes

  1. ELAN is a qualitative video and audio annotation software developed by The Language Archive, (https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan).

  2. The term data columns refers to those table columns that contain measured values; header columns and rows are omitted from enumeration.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the two anonymous reviewers whose comments, suggestions, and recommendations helped to improve the clarity this manuscript. We would further like to thank and acknowledge the participants, teachers, and parents from three New Zealand Schools for their time and support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Design, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

    Nicholas Vanderschantz

  2. Department of Software Engineering, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

    Annika Hinze

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Contributions

Vanderschantz contributed to conceptualisation, methodology, formal analysis, investigation, data curation, writing (original draft), writing (review and editing), visualisation; Hinze contributed to conceptualisation, methodology, validation, writing (review and editing), visualisation, supervision

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Correspondence to Nicholas Vanderschantz.

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Ethical approval for this research was given by the University of Waikato Human Research Ethics Committee in accordance with University policies and principles of human research.

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Vanderschantz, N., Hinze, A. Children’s query formulation and search result exploration. Int J Digit Libr 22, 385–410 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-021-00316-9

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