The influence of surface and deep cues on primary and secondary school students' assessment of relevance in Web menus

There’s a creepy guy on the other end at Google!: engaging middle school students in a drawing activity to elicit their mental models of Google

“…Positioning a person/people behind the scenes of the computer or device screen mirrors the way people are accustomed to finding information offline-asking teachers, parents, librarians, and others questions directly and getting answers in return. Such an understanding of Google (as a person who can be expected to return a relevant response) may help to explain earlier researchers' findings that young people may rely on surface cues in assessing the relevance of search results (Rouet et al 2011) and may simply choose the first search result listed (Wartella et al 2016). In depicting Google as connections, students revealed their understanding of the necessity of a technological means, whether wired or wireless, to access the information online through our devices.…”

“…In their study on how middle-and high-school-aged students are able to distinguish and choose search engine results based on discipline and lexical relationship to the search topic, Keil and Kominsky (2013) found ''a strong developmental shift during adolescence in evaluations of search engine results,'' and, in particular, a marked improvement in the older students' ''ability to recognize deeper discipline-based relationships in the absence of lexical similarity'' (p. 4). In another study (Rouet et al 2011), researchers analyzed results from 174 7th-12th graders and found that ''up to early secondary school, students are highly sensitive to surface relevance cues when selecting website titles from lists,'' and that upper case keyword letters tended to be especially persuasive (p. 212). This study confirmed an earlier model by Rouet, the TRACE (''Task-based Relevance Assessment and Content Extraction'') model, that shows ''relevance-based reading requires a combination of superficial and deep semantic processing (p. 212).…”

Does Navigation Always Predict Performance? Effects of Navigation on Digital Reading are Moderated by Comprehension Skills

“…From the perspective of a developmental model, one can argue that these students still fail on matching their navigation goals to the available links by means of inferences. Thus, their assessments of a link's relevance might rely on more superficial processes, such as links' typography (Rouet et al, 2011) or word matching (Cerdán et al, 2011;Salmerón et al, 2015), e.g., if the goal and the hyperlink share a particular word. By using those cues to navigate, students may still access pages that are relevant for their goal, but nonetheless they won't be able to make complete sense of the information on those pages.…”

“…A student might lack offline comprehension skills, but still have the skill necessary to navigate a digital text. For example students may match words in the question to words in the text, without a thorough examination of the relevance of that particular text section (Cerdán, Gilabert, & Vidal-Abarca, 2011;Salmerón, Cerdán, & Naumann, 2015), or they may use typographical cues of hyperlinks to guide their navigation (Rouet et al, 2011). In this case, however, despite an apparently good navigation, comprehension outcomes will be poor.…”

Threatened individuals prefer positive information during Internet search: An experimental laboratory study

“…Another line of models we are focusing on represents Internet search as a process where searchers go through consecutive steps (e.g., Brand-Gruwel, Wopereis, & Vermetten, 2005;Brand-Gruwel, Wopereis, & Walraven, 2009;Rouet, Ros, Goumi, Macedo-Rouet, & Dinet, 2011). The Internet search process involves that individuals deal with information by selecting links from search engine result pages (SERPs), scanning webpages, and thoroughly processing and recalling information from webpages (Brand-Gruwel et al, 2005.…”