Children's internet searching on complex problems: Performance and process analyses
✍ Scribed by Schacter, John ;Chung, Gregory K. W. K. ;Dorr, Aimée
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 82 KB
- Volume
- 49
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0002-8231
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The research reported here examined the effects of task has so much information of varying quality been available structure on elementary school students' information in such an accessible and dynamic environment. seeking on the Internet. Thirty-two 5th-and 6th-grade This study is a first attempt at understanding processes students searched on 2 tasks (1 well-defined and 1 illelementary school children use when seeking information defined) for information that was relevant to solving 2 on the Internet. We employed two engaging informationproblems. Information-seeking process behaviors were analyzed by collecting computer trace data of each stu-seeking tasks derived from real-world problems. We meadents search. Information-seeking performance was sured search processes by analyzing computer trace data measured by 2 adult raters and by students' own judgof each student's search. We measured children's search ments of all documents found. Analyses of students' properformance on these tasks by the relevance ratings of cess behaviors illustrated that children are interactive adults and students for the documents students found.
information seekers, preferring to browse rather than plan or employ systematic analytic-based searching In this article, we focus on: (a) Internet-specific varistrategies. Performance results indicated that children ables which may affect children's searching processes have difficulty finding relevant information on the Inand performance; and (b) task structure effects on student ternet, however, children did search more effectively on information retrieval. Our position is that the Internet the ill-defined task than on the well-defined one. Further, presents a unique information retrieval environment that when judging their own performance, students rated their work equally on both tasks, yet adult judges found leads to several hypotheses contrary to the prevailing that students performed significantly worse on the wellbody of research on children's online information seeking defined task. and problem solving.