Viewing online searching within a learning paradigm

In this research, we investigate whether one can model online searching as a learning paradigm. We examined the searching characteristics of 41 participants engaged in 246 searching tasks. We classified the searching tasks according to Anderson and Krathwohl's Taxonomy, an updated version of Bloom's taxonomy. Anderson and Krathwohl is a six level categorization of cognitive learning. Research results show that Applying takes the most searching effort as measured by queries per session and specific topics searched per sessions. The categories of Remembering and Understanding, which are lower-order learning levels, exhibit searching characteristics similar to the higher order categories of Evaluating and Creating. It seems that searchers rely primarily on their internal knowledge and use searching primarily as fact checking and verification when engaged in Evaluating and Creating. Implications are that the commonly held notions of Web searchers having simple information goals may not be correct. We discuss the implications for Web searching, including designing interfaces to support exploration and alternate views.