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A Longitudinal Study to Understand Learning During Search

An important step to foster learning during search is to identify behavioural patterns that distinguish searchers gaining more vs. less knowledge during search. Previous efforts have studied searchers in the short term, typically during a single lab session. We propose a longitudinal study to analyse searching behaviour of students enrolled in a university course, over the span of a few months. Our research aims are to (i) identify how searching behaviour changes over time, as students gain new knowledge on a subject, (ii) whether the perceived-relevance of specific information objects change due to knowledge acquisition, and, (iii) identify if differences exist in search processes for previously seen vs. unseen search tasks. We posit that findings from this research study will be informative for building improved information retrieval systems which are supportive of search as learning.