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This study explored user interactions when accomplishing learning related tasks from a new perspective, the process perspective, and examined three main types of user interactions: searching, reading and writing behaviors. The goal is to characterize how users' searching, reading, and writing interactions change at different stages, and explore what contextual factors are related to the task completion process. A user experiment with thirty‐two participants was conducted, and each participant was asked to work on two types of learning tasks: receptive tasks and critical tasks. For data analysis, we calculated the percentage of searching time, reading time and writing time during four stages, to characterize users' task completion process. Our results demonstrated that users' reading efforts were evenly distributed at four stages; half of their searching efforts were devoted at the first stage and writing efforts were mainly spent at the last stage. In addition, we also found task type and users' cognitive style had significant effects on users' searching, reading, writing process, and their writing efforts in the first stage were correlated to the quality of learning outcome. This study took the process perspective to characterize user interactions at different stages, and this perspective provides us a more comprehensive picture of user interactions and has implications for the design of search systems to fully support user interactions and their task completion process.

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This study examined users' self-rated search ability with their objective search performance, their subjective assessed search performance, and the accuracy of subjective assessments. Thirty students were recruited for the lab mode online search competition. Participants were asked to rate their search abilities before searching, and predict search performance after searching. The results showed that users' self-rated search ability was not related to their objective search performance in this search competition. As for subjective evaluation of their search performance, no significant difference was found on predicted-as-right, predicted-as-unsureness rate, or the correct and incorrect prediction rates. Besides 70% of correct predictions, all searchers tended to overestimate their search performance, but self-rated low searchers had more chance to predict their answers to the search tasks as wrong and underestimated their search performance sometimes. This study is an exploratory examination on users' self-rated search ability, and has implications to understand how searchers evaluate their search abilities and search performance.