In today's world, a child of age 3 plays with a mobile phone rather than plastic toys. Most children nowadays grow up using computers and they work with the computers rather well than the average adult. But the question is that whether they are able to find relevant information on the internet or not? As most of the studies regarding web use are focused on adults, same results cannot be used for children. So, we need to think from the perspective of a child what information he/she wants from the internet.
Most of the problems faced by the children while seeking information from the internet as the search interface is designed by an adult.Also, search strategies for finding information is designed based on the adult experiences. There are many differences between an adult and a child information seeking behavior in terms of interaction style, navigation style, and mindset. So to provide children with an effective and efficient way of information seeking we need to understand how to give them information in ways consistent with their learning and cognitive abilities.
To do so Netherlands Public Library Association started a research program to study children's search behavior called 'The digital youth library'. The study is basically focused on children of age 10 through 12 which are not mature in their use of the internet. Research on children's information retrieval is mostly focused on testing their performances and search patterns on a given interface.
So what information generally a child of age 10 or 12 looks for? Well, it can be related to their course homework like for example what kind of food most small birds eat or so? Now, first of a child needs to conceptualize this information need and then formulate it into a query eg. bird food. Now, this query is feed into an educational website for children which will match the query with relevant documents in the information world. This can be clearly understood by the below image.
When we talk about information need of the children we first need to group children based on different characteristics like age, gender etc. and try to understand the question generated from their information need is research-based or fact-based ? Now, to formulate the information need into a query, children have to form a definite concept of their information need.This is why it is important to know what a child is thinking and how he/she is thinking while searching for information.
A lot of research has been done comparing children performance with different types of browsing tool or user interface. Now, since the query has been formulated we can feed into the search system which is generally known as Information Retrieval system and the given system will run the query and give the relevant documents. There are two ways to present the results: on the same page on which the children are searching or on a new page. Also, the documents should be presented according to score or ranking by matching documents or the documents most referred by others.
The research shows that children face difficulties while using both searching and browsing tools like using a mouse or keyboard, or formulating the correct query as they tend to make spelling mistakes and lacks the knowledge to form the query. Also, children use different search criteria than adults. They usually search by concrete genres. In the end, I would say it is important to design an information retrieval system based on a child's perspective which helps children to fulfil their information need while considering the problems with regular information retrieval system.
Refrences:
https://research.utwente.nl/en/publications/childrens-information-retrieval-beyond-examining-search-strategie
Most of the problems faced by the children while seeking information from the internet as the search interface is designed by an adult.Also, search strategies for finding information is designed based on the adult experiences. There are many differences between an adult and a child information seeking behavior in terms of interaction style, navigation style, and mindset. So to provide children with an effective and efficient way of information seeking we need to understand how to give them information in ways consistent with their learning and cognitive abilities.
To do so Netherlands Public Library Association started a research program to study children's search behavior called 'The digital youth library'. The study is basically focused on children of age 10 through 12 which are not mature in their use of the internet. Research on children's information retrieval is mostly focused on testing their performances and search patterns on a given interface.
So what information generally a child of age 10 or 12 looks for? Well, it can be related to their course homework like for example what kind of food most small birds eat or so? Now, first of a child needs to conceptualize this information need and then formulate it into a query eg. bird food. Now, this query is feed into an educational website for children which will match the query with relevant documents in the information world. This can be clearly understood by the below image.
A Children's Inormation Retrieval Paradigm
A lot of research has been done comparing children performance with different types of browsing tool or user interface. Now, since the query has been formulated we can feed into the search system which is generally known as Information Retrieval system and the given system will run the query and give the relevant documents. There are two ways to present the results: on the same page on which the children are searching or on a new page. Also, the documents should be presented according to score or ranking by matching documents or the documents most referred by others.
The research shows that children face difficulties while using both searching and browsing tools like using a mouse or keyboard, or formulating the correct query as they tend to make spelling mistakes and lacks the knowledge to form the query. Also, children use different search criteria than adults. They usually search by concrete genres. In the end, I would say it is important to design an information retrieval system based on a child's perspective which helps children to fulfil their information need while considering the problems with regular information retrieval system.
Refrences:
https://research.utwente.nl/en/publications/childrens-information-retrieval-beyond-examining-search-strategie
Comments
Post a Comment