Differences and similarities in information seeking: children and adults as Web users

読解支援に関係しそうな論文[1]を読んだので，メモしておきます．

本論文は，Web上の情報探索における子供と大人との間の相違点と類似点を調査する研究について報告している．この研究では，Yahooligansを用いて事実を探索する課題を行う際のユーザの思考，感情，行動について調査している．この結果，大人のほうが子供より多く正解を発見できた．また，行き詰まりに対する回復方法，閲覧方法（大人はブラウジング，子供は検索に割く時間が多い），タスクへの集中において両グループの間に違いがみられた．

注目フレーズ

• Research on children's use of the Internet/Web and adult use of the Internet/Web shows that both user groups have cognitive difficulties constructing effective search queries, and that most of these users do not use the Web effectively.
• Children were interactive information seekers, preferring to browse rather than plan or employ systematic and analytic search strategies.
• Children had difficulty finding relevant information, but were more successful in finding information on the open-ended task than the fact-finding task.
• Users did not have many queries per search, rarely modified queries, and used advanced search syntax minimally in constructing queries.
• Following a link and using the Back command were the most frequent Web actions
• 58% of the pages the participants visited were re-visits, ant that these pages were re-visited through activating Back command.
• Zipf's distribution was the best fit for the frequency of user node visiting.
• The type of search task did not influence the path patterns user followed.
• Frequent use of Back command seems to be common among Web users, regardless of age.
• Information skills programs must consider levels of cognitive development and, as importantly, pay attention to the process skills students need to plan and evaluate all aspects of information utilization and retrieval.
• Age is not a factor that influences information seeking behavior.
• Both student groups were unsuccessful when they searched by keyword and more successful when they browsed subject hierarchies.
• Both children and adults used Netscape Back command to navigate among Web pages.
• Many children apply natural language in querying search engines.

[1] Dania Bilal, Joe Kirby: Differences and similarities in information seeking: children and adults as Web users, Information Processing and Management, Vol. 38, No. 5, pp. 649-670, 2002-09