Key Words: Internet, search engine, information literacy, K-12

The Internet can provide access to a wealth of information that can be useful to both teachers and students. However, too often the utility of Internet content must be weighed against the effort a child or teacher must expend to find material suitable for a particular lesson. Simply put, searching for information on the Internet can be time consuming and frustrating. One variable confounding a better match between the needs of educational institutions and the power of the Internet is the dependence on traditional Web search engines to find appropriate educational material. These Web search engines provide raw horsepower, but offer little assistance in guiding and harnessing this power. In other words, Web searches often suffer from high recall (many useful things found) and low precision (even more useless things found). Teachers, and especially children, do not have the time or the attention span to sift through large numbers of documents to find the few of interest. K12-Search is developing software that helps bring the power of the Internet and Web search engines to the classroom in a form suitable for teachers and students. K12-Search is a new graphical user interface developed exclusively for K-12 schools and their specific needs. For example, K12-Search makes it easy to locate relevant and age-appropriate material on the Internet.

The K12-Search interface guides students through the process of formulating and describing their information needs. Modified versions of traditional Information Retrieval (IR) tools will transform the information need into a search query, utilizing knowledge of teacher objectives, student level, and subject matter. The intent is to let children express their information needs in English, have the software transform it into a complex structured query, and pass it off to the Web search engine. Returned results are organized automatically, using clustering and machine learning techniques. This is viewed as a Tsecond stageU of searching, done at the interface, in which results are organized and further filtering takes place.

In addition to the search interface, a series of lesson plans are being developed and utilized to help introduce students to the Internet. Specifically, students are learning (in simple terms) what the Internet is, how to use the Internet to find information, and gaining information literacy skills so they will be more intelligent consumers of Internet related information. Presently, the software prototype as well as the information literacy lessons plans are being used with approximately 100 4th grade students in Western Massachusetts.

K12-Search is a joint effort of the University of Massachusetts Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR), Westfield State College, the University of Massachusetts Library, Javanet, and Merriam-Webster Inc. K12-Search is funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, Library of Congress, and Department of Commerce (award IIS-9812358 and cooperative agreement EEC-9209623).

Topics Include:

• A demonstration of the search attributes of the K-12 Search software.
• Particulars of how K12-Search works and was developed.
• A presentation and discussion of Internet/Information literacy lesson plans developed for elementary school students.
• A sharing of information based on experiences in schools.
• Future goals will be addressed.

To appear in The Proceedings of the 1999 National Educational Computing Conference, June 22, 1999, Atlantic City, NJ.