One of the core problems is the development of electronic information retrieval tools is how to ensure that users find relevant information. While an extensive body of research exists on how aduts make relevance decisions, no known research has tudied the relevance critieria children apply or the process children go through when trying to determine the applicability of retrieved information to a given problem. This naturalistic study explores these relevance issues for children through the use of think-aloud, shadowing, and participant observer techniques as childeren searched electronic resources for a class assigment in a school library setting. This study describes the types of electronic resources sued by studients, identifies a set of relevance criteria applied by elementary school children for textual and pictorial information, and assesses techniques used by studients to make relevance judments when they examine bookds and explore electronic resources.
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