Impact of Cooperative Search Experience on Information Retrieval Ability
Kohei Kawaguchi (AY 2012)
Today, computers and the Internet have been introduced into almost all educational settings, and knowledge and skills related to them are becoming increasingly important. In this context, information retrieval has become indispensable for searching web pages, etc. Students with high information retrieval skills are expected to be able to perform higher quality learning tasks in a shorter time. This information retrieval ability tends to depend on an element of personal experience in terms of how much they use computers on a daily basis. Therefore, it is believed that students can learn new retrieval skills by observing others' retrieval experiences or by sharing their retrieval experiences with others. In this study, we focused on cooperative search, in which several people share a single goal and search for information together. By analyzing the results of experiments on how information retrieval skills change through cooperative search, we will search for a better retrieval style.
In this study, we asked experimental participants to perform three Web page retrieval tasks a total of three times through a usage experiment. The procedure was as follows. The first time, the participants were asked to perform the search alone, and their information retrieval ability was inferred from the time it took them to complete the task and their self-assessment of their level of success. Then, in the second session, they will experience two types of retrieval: cooperative retrieval and independent retrieval. The third session was administered approximately one week after the first. By comparing and analyzing the results of the third session with the results of the first session, the design of the experiment was to clarify how and why the differences in the two retrieval styles in the second session changed the participants' ability to retrieve information in the third session.
Comparing the results of the first and third searches in the use experiment, participants whose second search was a cooperative search showed a significant reduction in task completion time compared to participants whose third search was a solo search. This result supports the hypothesis of the present study, as it indicates that cooperative retrieval can influence subsequent retrieval and lead to a reduction in task completion time. Furthermore, the trend of the results differed depending on the type of task, suggesting that there is an appropriate retrieval style depending on the type of task.
Although the hypothesis was supported by the usage experiment, there are some problems, such as the class and grade bias of the participants, which are expected to be resolved in future studies. In addition, it is expected that more detailed analysis of the differences in results depending on the type of task, which could not be clarified in this study, will be conducted using query logs, speech recordings, and other methods, and that this research will be used in information retrieval education.
(Translated by DeepL)