Adaptive Search Support for Teachers in Lesson Planning

authored by

Ratan Sebastian

Abstract

Teachers report difficulties engaging in search in the context of lesson planning. Despite the availability of customised search solutions like Learning Object Repositories, most teachers report using general-purpose search engines like Google. Unlike students - to whom most research in educational search is directed - teachers are experts capable of using many types of resources for their tasks. In addition, since they teach multiple classes, they switch educational contexts frequently. These circumstances present unique challenges for user modelling. This thesis investigates how an adaptive browser-based search engine augmentation could support teachers in both exploratory and lookup search tasks. A preliminary user study was conducted to understand the actual search behaviour of teachers in their everyday environment and to investigate the inference of search tasks and context from search behaviour. Using this inferred information, personalized search aids could be delivered through the extension such as search engine result page (SERP) summarization for exploratory search and context-based search snippets. The relevance of existing search snippets was investigated and potential for improvement using teachers' search context was identified. With the rest of the PhD, I plan to expand the user study to get more concrete results about teacher search behaviour and implement and test this adaptive browser extension to see how it affects the search experience for teachers.

Organisation(s)

L3S Research Centre

Type

Conference contribution

Pages

20-24

No. of pages

5

Publication date

28.06.2024

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Software

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 3 - Good Health and Well-being

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.1145/3631700.3664921 (Access: Closed)