Abstract
In the “digital native” generation, internet search engines are a commonly used source of information. However, adolescents may fail to recognize relevant search results when they are related in discipline to the search topic but lack other cues. Middle school students, high school students, and adults rated simulated search results for relevance to the search topic. The search results were designed to contrast deep discipline-based relationships with lexical similarity to the search topic. Results suggest that the ability to recognize disciplinary relatedness without supporting cues may continue to develop into high school. Despite frequent search engine usage, younger adolescents may require additional support to make the most of the information available to them.
Highlights
In the last decade the use of internet search-engines has skyrocketed among American middle school students [1]
There was a developmental effect in the ability to recognize strongly related ‘‘HIT’’ items over unrelated ‘‘MISS’’ items, which is not wholly unexpected given previous results on children’s performance on internet search tasks
A novel developmental effect was found in the ability to recognize deeper discipline-based relationships in the absence of lexical similarity
Summary
In the last decade the use of internet search-engines has skyrocketed among American middle school students [1]. Middle school students (ages 10–13) may be led astray by the capitalization of keywords or by their limited reading comprehension skills [7] They may be seduced by surface lexical matches (e.g., in searching for an answer to the question ‘‘Why do people catch colds?’’, they might be attracted to a top ranked item entitled ‘‘Cold weather may pose health risks’’). In addition to the general difficulties with discipline-based knowledge clustering noted above, recent work has found that children require ‘‘images and titles related to the contents’’ in order to identify relevant information [13], building on the over-reliance on surface features found in previous work [8]. We expected a significant increase in the ratings of discipline-related items in the high school years, but because we included a more complete spectrum of ages than previous work, we could not predict what specific ages would differ from each other
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