Page 11 - R_EdQuire White Paper Nov 2017 v3.4

EdQuire White Paper: Computer learning behaviour in K-12
Nov 2017 V3.4
Page 11 of 15
Result
Google searches dwarfed that of competitors with 100% of students using Google, and only a minority ever
using Bing (8%) or Yahoo (5%) (Figure 8 Left). Of all searches, Google accounted for 99.5 and less than 3% of
searches utilised any search tools.

Internet Proportion
search engine of usage

Google 99.5%
Bing 0.43%

Yahoo 0.04%

wolframalpha 0.01%

Figure 8. Proportion of students using a specific search engine (left), proportion of searches using specific
search engine (middle), proportion of searches using search tools (right).

Discussion
The dominance of Google does not surprise considering Google has been genericized to mean internet
search. It is of note, however that vast majority of students have never used any other search engine. Only
2.9% of searches used search tools, and even this may be an overestimate because we did distinguish
unintended use of tools, such as ‘+’ in typed in equations or ‘and’ in a sentence. This minimal use of search
engine tools may be a reflection of lack of skills, but could also be due to either intuitive responses from
search engines not requiring the use of such tools or a preference for iterative use of searches to create a
trail converging on the answer rather than constructing a single complex search. There is a suggestion by
White & Huang (2010) that such an iterative journey of discovery may itself be beneficial to learning by
providing context to the searched for information. Much needed assessments of information literacy will be
derived from further analysis of our search data – using natural language, search trails and the quality of
information finally selected by students.

2.9 Effect of data on Self-regulation

Method
In order to assess the self-regulatory effect of real-time formative feedback of computer usage to students,
we gave students in School 1 access to their edQuire data for a period of 10 days and compared that
computer use data to a preceding 10 day control period in a longitudinal study design.

© Copyright 2017 | All Rights Reserved by FIC Technology