Friday, July 1
4:00 PM-5:00 PM
WEST
Room 5.1 - Faculty of Letters Building

Just Google It? Chinese University Students’ Web Search Skills for Academic Tasks

Virtual Brief Paper ID: 32831
  1. Mingming Zhou
    Nanyang Technological University
  2. aaa
    Yabo Xu
    Sun Yat-sen University
  3. Liu Liu
    Sun Yat-sen University
  4. Yingbin Su
    Sun Yat-sen University

Abstract: The goal of this pilot study was to evaluate and describe Chinese learners' search strategies for academic tasks. Participants were 12 university students who were asked to answer two essay questions. Collected data included students' demographic information, experience in online search, traces of student searching behaviors, audit trail lists of search strings used and time spent in each stage of search. Students with different levels of task performance adopted different strategies to search, including time allocation strategy, construction of search queries and recovery from unsuccessful search attempts. The results suggested that when conducting web search for academic tasks, successful searchers tended to spend more time on accessing and evaluating information by trying with different search queries and more often referred back to the task question to ensure their progress, while poor-performance students were not skilled at monitoring the process and less active in adapting their strategies.

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