Abstract
Studies in searching as learning (SAL) have revealed that user knowledge gain not only manifests over a long-term learning period, but also occurs in single short-term web search sessions. Though prior works have shown that the knowledge gain of collaborators can be influenced by user demographics and searching strategies in long-term collaborative learning, little is known about the effect of these factors on user knowledge gain in short-term collaborative web search. In this paper, we present a study addressing the knowledge gain of user pairs in single collaborative web search sessions. Using crowdsourcing we recruited 454 unique users (227 random pairs), who then collaboratively worked on informational search tasks spanning 10 different topics and information needs. We investigated how users’ demographics and traits, and the interaction between these factors could influence their knowledge gain. We found that in contrast to offline collaboration cases, user demographics such as gender, age, etc. do not significantly effect users’ knowledge gain in collaborative web search sessions. Instead, our results highlight the presence of labor division of queries and particular interaction patterns in communication that facilitate knowledge gain in user pairs. Based on these findings, we propose a multiple linear regression model to predict the knowledge gain of users in collaborative web search sessions from the perspective of team composition.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | HT'20: Proceedings of the 31st ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media |
Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) |
Pages | 91-100 |
Number of pages | 10 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 978-1-4503-7098-1 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2020 |
Event | HT'20: 31st ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media - Online event, United States Duration: 13 Jul 2020 → 15 Jul 2020 Conference number: 31 |
Conference
Conference | HT'20: 31st ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media |
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Abbreviated title | HT'20 |
Country/Territory | United States |
City | Online event |
Period | 13/07/20 → 15/07/20 |
Other | Virtual/online event due to COVID-19 |
Bibliographical note
Virtual/online event due to COVID-19Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care
Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.
Keywords
- Collaborative web search
- Knowledge gain
- Team composition
- Search as learning
- Crowdsourcing
- User study