Abstract
The study of children's information retrieval is still for the greater part untouched territory. Meanwhile, children can become lost in the digital information world, because they are confronted with search interfaces, both designed by and for adults. Most current research on children's information retrieval focuses on examining children's search performance on existing search interfaces to determine what kind of interfaces are suitable for children's search behaviour. However, to discover the true nature of children's search behaviour, we state that research has to go beyond examining search strategies used with existing search interfaces by examining children's cognitive processes during information-seeking. A paradigm of children's information retrieval should provide an overview of all the components beyond search interfaces and search strategies that are part of children's information retrieval process. Better understanding of the nature of children's search behaviour can help adults design interfaces and information retrieval systems that both support children's natural search strategies and help them find their way in the digital information world.
Highlights
Children’s access to the information world is increasingly shifting from the physical library or classroom to the digital world
As a basis for our research, we present a paradigm of children’s information retrieval in Section 2, consisting of the components that model the process of a child searching for information after it has been given a particular search task
Does research that focuses on the interface really uncover the heart of the matter? Can we support children’s information retrieval just by knowing which search tools do and do not work for them? If research reports that children perform better with a particular search tool in comparison to another search tool, can we conclude that this search tool provides an approach preferred by children
Summary
Children’s access to the information world is increasingly shifting from the physical library or classroom to the digital world. The study reported in this paper focuses on children’s information-seeking and discusses children’s search strategies and problems, and research directions to examine how to support children’s search behaviour in digital environments. Search strategies required to find information are based on adults’ experience This causes problems for children, because children are different from adults in many ways: they have other needs than adults and their cognitive, social, physical and emotional development has not yet reached the adolescent formal operational stage of development (Piaget and Inhelder, 1969, in Cooper, 2005). Research on children’s information retrieval mostly focuses on testing children’s performance and examining their search strategies on a given interface. We will discuss what kind of research we believe is needed to discover the nature of children’s search behaviour and the real information-seeking problems children cope with, concerning conceptualization and query formulation
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