Right Way, Right Time: Towards a Better Comprehension of Young Students’ Needs when Looking for Relevant Search Results
Mohammad Aliannejadi, Emiliana Murgia, Monica Landoni, Theo Huibers, and Maria Soledad Pera. 2021. “Right Way, Right Time: Towards a Better Comprehension of Young Students’ Needs when Looking for Relevant Search Results”. Short paper in Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP ‘21). ACM, 95-100 pp. DOI:10.1145/3450613.3456843.
Abstract
We report on the exploration we conducted to better understand children’s needs for the design of optimal Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) that can help them notice relevant resources when performing online inquiry tasks assigned by teachers in a classroom context. We analyse children’s interactions with traditional SERP as well as SERP enriched with emojis. In particular, we critically look for emerging trends linking children’s engagement with the different SERP and search success (based on experts’ assessments). We also identify areas remaining to be interpreted and explored in future studies. On this mixed ground, we showcase the complexity of our design space and how instead of a one size fits all approach we should aim at producing adaptive SERP to cater for children’s different and ever evolving skills in searching and recognising useful results that can in turn truly support their learning.