Towards searching as a learning process : A review of current perspectives and future directions <s> Introduction <s> In this research, we investigated whether a learning process has unique information searching characteristics. The results of this research show that information searching is a learning process with unique searching characteristics specific to particular learning levels. In a laboratory experiment, we studied the searching characteristics of 72 participants engaged in 426 searching tasks. We classified the searching tasks according to Anderson and Krathwohl's taxonomy of the cognitive learning domain. Research results indicate that applying and analyzing, the middle two of the six categories, generally take the most searching effort in terms of queries per session, topics searched per session, and total time searching. Interestingly, the lowest two learning categories, remembering and understanding, exhibit searching characteristics similar to the highest order learning categories of evaluating and creating. Our results suggest the view of Web searchers having simple information needs may be incorrect. Instead, we discovered that users applied simple searching expressions to support their higher-level information needs. It appears that searchers rely primarily on their internal knowledge for evaluating and creating information needs, using search primarily for fact checking and verification. Overall, results indicate that a learning theory may better describe the information searching process than more commonly used paradigms of decision making or problem solving. The learning style of the searcher does have some moderating effect on exhibited searching characteristics. The implication of this research is that rather than solely addressing a searcher's expressed information need, searching systems can also address the underlying learning need of the user. <s> BIB001 </s> Towards searching as a learning process : A review of current perspectives and future directions <s> Introduction <s> Research tools critical for exploratory search success involve the creation of new interfaces that move the process beyond predictable fact retrieval. <s> BIB002 </s> Towards searching as a learning process : A review of current perspectives and future directions <s> Introduction <s> An eye tracking experiment revealed that college student users have substantial trust in Google’s ability to rank results by their true relevance to the query. When the participants selected a link to follow from Google’s result pages, their decisions were strongly biased towards links higher in position even if the abstracts themselves were less relevant. While the participants reacted to artificially reduced retrieval quality by greater scrutiny, they failed to achieve the same success rate. This demonstrated trust in Google has implications for the search engine’s tremendous potential influence on culture, society, and user traffic on the Web. <s> BIB003 </s> Towards searching as a learning process : A review of current perspectives and future directions <s> Introduction <s> Children and adolescents seek information both to support their school-based learning activities and their leisure activities. They continue to use traditional information sources such as books and magazines, but increasingly turn towards the Internet when seeking information for either educational or recreational purposes. This article discusses their information-seeking behavior when confronting both electronic and print sources. In particular it focuses upon the source selection, retrieval strategies (searching and browsing) and information evaluation techniques adopted by young users, as well as the technological support that can be offered them through, for example, appropriately designed interfaces. It draws upon information-seeking theories as they relate to young people, research studies of information-seeking behaviors among children and adolescents, and experimental and operational information systems targeted at young users. <s> BIB004 </s> Towards searching as a learning process : A review of current perspectives and future directions <s> Introduction <s> Children are among the most frequent users of the Internet, yet searching and browsing the web can present many challenges. Studies over the past two decades on how children search were conducted with finite and pre-determined content found in CD-ROM applications, online digital libraries, and web directories. However, with the current popularity of the open Internet and keyword-based interfaces for searching it, more critical analysis of the challenges children face today is needed. This paper presents the findings of our initial study to understand how children ages 7, 9, and 11 search the Internet using keyword interfaces in the home. Our research has revealed that although today's children have been exposed to computers for most of their lives, spelling, typing, query formulation, and deciphering results are all still potential barriers to finding the information they need. <s> BIB005 </s> Towards searching as a learning process : A review of current perspectives and future directions <s> Introduction <s> The purpose of this entry is to present and analyze the relationship between learning and information seeking. The analysis draws on research studies on information seeking set in educational contexts and is framed in theories of learning, mainly constructivism. Themes of the entry are based on five dimensions of the relationship between learning and information seeking: 1) seeking information for learning purposes; 2) learning information seeking; 3) teaching information seeking; 4) learning from information; and 5) reshaping conditions for information seeking and learning through information and communications technologies (ICTs). Conclusions are that the fields of learning and information seeking draw nearer to one another partly due to educational ideas based in constructivism and partly due to the development of digital tools that reshape conditions for learning in postmodern society. This development contributes to the transformation of the professional role of librarians, implying an emphasis on the pedagogical aspects of the profession. Future prospects for information seeking research and practice linked to learning may involve strengthened interests in the cognitive authority and expertise of information as well as information sharing through communicative interaction <s> BIB006 </s> Towards searching as a learning process : A review of current perspectives and future directions <s> Introduction <s> The purpose of this Panel is to discuss and elaborate on testing and evaluation challenges facing the designers of new and novel information systems for children. Since 2002, ASIST has hosted 16 papers, panels, and posters on information retrieval systems, digital libraries, and user interfaces for children, but very little discussion has been devoted to methodological challenges. <s> BIB007 </s> Towards searching as a learning process : A review of current perspectives and future directions <s> Introduction <s> This study replicates a previous study based on work in psychology, which demonstrates that students who score as below proficient in information literacy (IL) skills have a miscalibrated self-view of their ability. Simply stated, these students tend to believe that they have above-average IL skills, when, in fact, an objective test of their ability indicates that they are below-proficient in terms of their actual skills. This investigation was part of an Institute of Museum and Library Services-funded project and includes demographic data about participants, their scores on an objective test of their information literacy skills, and self-estimates of their ability. Findings support previous research that indicates many students come to college without proficient IL skills, that students with below-proficient IL skills have inflated views of their ability, and that this miscalibration can also be expressed by students who test as proficient. Implications for research and practice are discussed. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. <s> BIB008 </s> Towards searching as a learning process : A review of current perspectives and future directions <s> Introduction <s> This research investigates how people's perceptions of information retrieval (IR) systems, their perceptions of search tasks, and their perceptions of self-efficacy influence the amount of invested mental effort (AIME) they put into using two different IR systems: a Web search engine and a library system. It also explores the impact of mental effort on an end user's search experience. To assess AIME in online searching, two experiments were conducted using these methods: Experiment 1 relied on self-reports and Experiment 2 employed the dual-task technique. In both experiments, data were collected through search transaction logs, a pre-search background questionnaire, a post-search questionnaire and an interview. Important findings are these: (1) subjects invested greater mental effort searching a library system than searching the Web; (2) subjects put little effort into Web searching because of their high sense of self-efficacy in their searching ability and their perception of the easiness of the Web; (3) subjects did not recognize that putting mental effort into searching was something needed to improve the search results; and (4) data collected from multiple sources proved to be effective for assessing mental effort in online searching. <s> BIB009 </s> Towards searching as a learning process : A review of current perspectives and future directions <s> Introduction <s> During a three-day workshop in February 2012, 45 Information Retrieval researchers met to discuss long-range challenges and opportunities within the field. The result of the workshop is a diverse set of research directions, project ideas, and challenge areas. This report describes the workshop format, provides summaries of broad themes that emerged, includes brief descriptions of all the ideas, and provides detailed discussion of six proposals that were voted "most interesting" by the participants. Key themes include the need to: move beyond ranked lists of documents to support richer dialog and presentation, represent the context of search and searchers, provide richer support for information seeking, enable retrieval of a wide range of structured and unstructured content, and develop new evaluation methodologies. <s> BIB010
Reviewing the current literature on students' searching behaviour with respect to learning tasks reveals a contradictory picture. Some studies show that students struggle to find the right keywords, formulate search queries and understand search results BIB007  BIB005 . When search results do not satisfy their information needs, students tend to accept those initial results uncritically, rather than re-evaluating the results and/or revising their search statements BIB004 . Students are also generally reluctant to look beyond the first few search results BIB003 . On the other hand, other studies show that students overestimate their search skills and believe that accessing, searching, using and evaluating sources of information are easy tasks that anyone can perform BIB008 . As a result, students tend to skim, evaluate and select online content quickly without investing much effort BIB009 . In general, previous studies imply that students' search behaviour and lack of search skills are the main problems: if students could only improve their search skills, they would be able to search better and possibly learn more in the process. We adopt a different approach to the problem in this paper. We focus not on issues with students' search behaviour, but instead on the ways in which information retrieval systems have been conceptualized and developed. Historically, search systems have long been characterized as a type of tool for retrieving relevant content or finding answers that satisfy people's information needs. From this perspective, research and development on search technology tends to focus on improving the effectiveness of search results to match document with search queries. In terms of the search user interface, the majority of search systems still display a ranked list of search results. This interface design signals the expectation that people may want to select relevant documents from the search results page efficiently and quickly. Indeed, users become accustomed to interacting with search systems in quick and easy ways. Typical systems may work well for certain kinds of tasks, such as look-up tasks, but not necessarily for other kinds of search tasks, such as learning, investigation and discovery, which require iteration, reflection and analysis of results by the searcher BIB002 . In other words, current search engines are optimized for only a certain kind of learning -acquiring factual knowledge -but are less successful at facilitating other kinds of learning, such as understanding, analysis, application or synthesis, in terms of Bloom's taxonomy  . The purpose of this paper is to conduct a critical review focusing on the intersection of searching and learning. This intersection is not, in itself, an entirely new research topic: what we contribute here is an attempt to bring together three disconnected research sub-areas in the field of information science: (a) investigation of students' web searching behaviour in learning environments; (b) design of information literacy programmes to improve students' search skills; and (c) development of search systems to support student learning during searching and enhance learning outcomes and experiences. We argue that research efforts across these three areas are disconnected because the relation between searching and learning has been simply assumed. Consequently, a literature review is helpful as it shows that the problem is not any lack of empirical studies demonstrating the significance of searching as learning. Rather, the problem lies in the lack of efforts to bring together and synthesize a variety of perspectives, concepts, factors and indicators that could better explain the complex relation between searching and learning. Recently, two information retrieval workshops took place that examined this intersection of searching and learning. The participants in SWIRL (The second strategic workshop on information retrieval in Lorne) in 2012 emphasized that information retrieval systems must play a more central role in supporting learning experiences through a variety of tools for exploring information. The SWIRL participants also proposed that information retrieval systems should support and foster a larger variety of more sophisticated search strategies BIB010 . In 2013, several participants in the Dagstuhl seminar on evaluation methodologies in information retrieval similarly proposed a research agenda called 'from searching to learning', emphasizing the importance of conceptualizing learning as search outcomes  . While it is encouraging that discussions have started in such workshops, the relation between searching and learning still tends to be taken for granted and not well articulated in the current literature, with a few exceptions BIB006 BIB001  . Reviewing the relationships between searching and learning is thus a critical step to establishing 'searching as learning' as a new research agenda. This is an important research problem because search systems represent a potentially powerful learning technology that can support and enhance human learning by providing access to rich, personalized online content. In this paper, we propose a new perspective on searching as a learning process that attempts to reconfigure current search systems in order to support and improve human learning. We believe that this paper will serve as a foundational review for other researchers who are interested in investigating searching and learning, and for developers and other information professionals who want to design and develop a new kind of search system that is optimized for learning tasks.