Let's Learn from Children: Scaffolding to Enable Search as Learning in the Educational Environment

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of scaffolding in enabling search as learning for children within educational environments, highlighting open challenges for future research in this area.

Contribution

It introduces a list of open challenges for the IR community to explore search as learning with children in primary school classrooms.

Findings

Identifies key challenges for SAL research in educational settings

Highlights the role of scaffolding in facilitating learning through search

Calls for community engagement in developing SAL solutions for children

Abstract

In this manuscript, we argue for the need to further look at search as learning (SAL) with children as the primary stakeholders. Inspired by how children learn and considering the classroom (regardless of the teaching modality) as a natural educational ecosystem, we posit that scaffolding is the tie that can simultaneously allow for learning to search while searching for learning. The main contribution of this work is a list of open challenges focused on the primary school classroom for the IR community to consider when setting up to explore and make progress on SAL research with and for children and beyond.