DATA ORGANISATION AND RETRIEVAL BY CHILDREN

Abstract

Summary. How does the structure of a database influence the user's organisation of information within it, and the user's retrieval of information from it? Three experiments investigated how young children (9–11 years of age) organised and retrieved words from a number of structures. Subjects were given sets of 10 to 12 words and asked to organise them on paper (Experiments 1 and 2) and to extract data from a pre‐organised set of words (Experiment 3). Each word set had a pre‐defined organisation based on the semantic relationship between the words. The four organisations used in the three experiments were: lists, hierarchies, networks and table structures. Experiment 1 showed that young children have severe difficulties in organising information into hierarchies and even more difficulty with tables. Lists were the most common form of data organisation used even when that organisational structure was not the most appropriate. A few children produced idiosyncratic organisations, possibly due to a failure to recognise the semantic relationship among the words. In Experiment 2, while some children could fit the word sets into “skeletons” that were explicitly designed to maintain all the semantic relationships between the words, the organisation of hierarchies and tables still proved difficult for most subjects. Experiment 3 showed, however, that young children can retrieve data from existing structures. These results are considered in relation to the increased use of computer‐based information retrieval systems in schools.