A Visual Search Tool for Early Elementary Science Students

This paper reports on the development of a visual search interface (called “SearchKids”) to support children ages 5–10 years in their efforts to find animals in a hierarchical information structure. This search tool presents both the querying process and its results graphically. The quantitative study reported here focused on two questions: (1) Can children understand and use a visual hierarchical domain structure to find particular instances of animals? (2) Can children construct search queries to conduct complex searches if sufficiently supported, both visually and conceptually? The results of this study showed that children were able to search very efficiently, primarily using a “fewest-steps” strategy, with the SearchKids software prototype. In addition, children were able to construct search queries with a high degree of accuracy. Results are discussed in terms of the scaffolding support that SearchKids provides, and its effectiveness in helping children to search efficiently and construct complex search queries.