Elementary School Students, Information Retrieval, and the Web

In today’s modern world, elementary school students (aged 5 to 12 years) use computers for a wide variety of tasks. These include communication (e-mail, instant messaging, and chatrooms), entertainment (games, video, music, etc.), leisure (such as information relating to hobbies and general interests), and information retrieval to support class-based learning. Internet access is now very widely available from home, school, and public library. A major reason for accessing the Internet is to find Web-based information relevant to classroom learning activities. Undoubtedly the Web represents an enormous and potentially rich source of multimedia information on topics within the elementary school curriculum, but accessing this information does pose a number of challenges. We identify in this article three major problem areas that currently impede effective exploitation by elementary school students of Webbased information resources: information systems are not necessarily intuitive or straightforward for children to use; basic information literacy skills too often are inadequate; and too little content appropriate for young users is available on the Web. The first technology to gain popularity as a means for children to retrieve information was the CD-ROM. By the early 1990s, a wide variety of multimedia information resources targeted specifically at children were available in this medium. Many were children’s encyclopedias, designed to facilitate rapid retrieval of discrete information “chunks,” and often multimedia versions of an original print title. These CD-ROMs could offer an engaging, interactive experience for the young student. Although students were willing to explore and experiment with interfaces (Large, Beheshti, Breuleux, & Renaud, 1994; Large, Beheshti, & Breuleux, 1998), they were not necessarily effective at retrieving information from these CD-ROM titles (Marchionini, 1989; Oliver, 1996). In any event, regardless of its strengths and weaknesses as a classroom resource, CD-ROM technology proved transient and was quickly superseded by the expansion of the Internet and the rise of the Web. Yet the information retrieval problems revealed by CD-ROMs would continue to plague the Web.