How Children See the Web: A Case Study of GradeSix Students

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How Children See the Web A Case Study of
Grade-Six Students

• Andrew Large
• McGill University

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The Web as a school learning resource

• Access from school/classroom
• Specialized sites
• Specialized portals
• Incorporation into information-seeking activities
  of elementary school students

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Effectiveness of Web as a Learning Resource

• How successful is the Web at supplying students
  with the kind of information needed to complete
  class assignments?
• Is the right kind of information available on the
  Web?
• Can the students locate that information?
• Can the they evaluate the information?

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And more particularly

• How do the students themselves rate the Web as a
  source of information for class assignments?

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Methodology

• 53 grade-six students (11-12years old) from one
  suburban elementary school
• Three workstations with color printers installed
  in classroom
• Students worked in groups of 2 or 3
• Twice-weekly search sessions from mid-March to
  early May
• Search sessions around 30 minutes
• 20 groups, 78 search sessions, 50 connect hours

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Methodology

• The Assignment
• Each student to produce a poster and make a class
  presentation on one of the sports represented at
  the Winter 1998 Olympic Games in Nagano, Japan
• Training sessions class individual

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Exit Interviews

• Each students asked a series of open-ended
  questions about
• Information-seeking
• Information content
• Frustrations
• Web compared with print as information source

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Information seeking

• Almost all students admitted to problems in
  looking for information
• Although browsing was widely used, students had
  few comments on it
• Had much more to say about using search engines

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Searching the Web

• Term selection troubled many difficult to
  express information needs by keywords
• Most search strings comprised multiple rather
  than single words
• But very few students employed full sentence
  structures

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Term selection

• Searches tended to be too general
• If you were to type in times, it would give me
  like times from all over the world. If I put
  Nagano, it would give me Nagano the place and all
  those other things. It was really frustrating.
• Some term rotation within search phrase
• (half-pipe snowboarding, snowboarding half-pipe)
• But also multiple search repetition

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Search features

• AltaVista and Infoseek default to OR
• Introduced to AND, capitalization of first
  letter, quotations for phrase searching
• Only quotations used to any extent
• And this usage was widely misunderstood
• (olympics ice dancing)

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Search frustrations

• Difficult to find a few highly relevant pages -
  often retrieved pages containing useless
  information.
• Unreliability of page titles/descriptions
• Slowness
• BUT - few problems with misspellings of search
  terms - group work

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Web versus Print for the Web

• Accessibility - saved time in visiting library
  difficulty of finding books in library - on loan,
  wrongly shelved, not in collection.
• Speed (39 students out of 50 thought it faster to
  search on the Web).

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Web versus Print for Print

• A minority preferred searching print sources
• Books faster - easier to find the right page -
  you just have to look in alphabetical order.
  Books are in alphabetical order.

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Information Content

• Most of the Web pages visited were not prepared
  specifically for elementary school students.
• The students were used to consulting print
  sources targeted at their age group.
• So the students may have to translate the content
  into their own syntax and vocabulary -
  information not packaged for them.
• Very few students commented upon authority of Web
  content

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Multimedia

• Web as a source of still images, moving images
  and sound.
• Still images widely captured and included on
  posters - mean of 5 images per poster.
• Images made posters more attractive, and used up
  space - but less favored than text as a way of
  presenting information.
• But little use of video or sound clips.

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Web versus Print

• Many students preferred Web because it contained
  more relevant information.
• But many students missed the specificity and
  precision of print-based information once you
  find the book that youre looking for and it has
  like all the stuff, it wont mix in anything that
  you dont need.
• Some students appreciated that decision depended
  on subject area.

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Observations

• Grade-six students are sophisticated information
  seekers and users - were able to compare Web with
  print.
• Technophiles, Traditionalists, Techo-Trads.
• Students were more familiar with print - for many
  Web was a new information resource.
• Information seeking was not intuitive - problems
  in choosing between searching and browsing,
  navigating, selecting search terms, modifying
  strategies, etc.

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Conclusions

• Students require assistance in information
  seeking - more training or more helpful interface
• Students require guidance on site selection -
  either from teacher or from interface
• Multimedia content requires multimedia class
  assignments

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Current research

• Evaluating 4 student-targeted portals using focus
  groups
• Designing a prototype portal