Evaluating Information Retrieval Systems for Children in an Educational Context

Technology is increasingly being used in classrooms. Information retrieval systems (IRS) are one example of such technologies that children often use, to search for information. How do they or their teachers know which search engine they should use? Little knowledge exists about when and which searching systems used by children are good, since existing research mainly focuses on other groups of users than children. Therefore, this paper aims at creating a way of evaluating information retrieval systems for children. That is achieved by performing a literature research and complementing that with the results of a questionnaire. The final result is a metric for evaluating an IRS, which contains aspects that can either be true, false or unclear. Future research is needed to get a more detailed metric; one example of a direction for future work is creating detailed evaluations per aspect. Achieving a detailed evaluation of IRS can help teachers and parents guide their children to use the right search engines.