Abstract Searching for information on the web has become an essential task in our society. This article presents a preregistered experimental study that investigates how the knowledge dimension (conceptual, procedural) and relevance of displaying spatiotemporal changes (high, low) for a given search task affect searchers' preference for different resource modalities (websites, videos). Additionally, effects of source reputation (high, low) were examined. Participants were confronted with 16 learning tasks and respective mock‐up video or website search results and had to indicate the likelihood of selecting the respective search results. The learning tasks varied regarding their knowledge dimension and their degree of spatiotemporal changes. Search results varied regarding source reputation and resource modality. Study results showed that search results with low source reputation were more likely to be selected when they were video results as compared to website results. Furthermore, for learning tasks with a high degree of spatiotemporal changes, a preference for videos over website results was found, while a low degree of spatiotemporal changes did not lead to modality preferences. To conclude, both knowledge dimension and degree of visuospatial changes of learning tasks seem to be promising classifications to consider for understanding users' source and modality selection during web‐based learning.

Today’s search engines allow users to discover relevant information in different types of modalities or media, e.g., web pages, text documents, images, or videos. It is, however, a challenging task to present mixed-modality result lists in an effective and easy-to-skim form. The two most commonly used approaches are to present the modalities side-by-side, each in a separate column of the result page; or to separate the modalities into multiple tabs. However, the field lacks a structured investigation on how the column or tab layout influence the users’ perception and usage of multimodal resources in an academic search task. In this paper, we present a user study (N=50) where the participants were asked to accomplish a search task for a fictive computer science seminar at the university. We evaluate the influence of the different layouts on (1) user search behavior (e.g., time until first resource is saved) and (2) the relevance of the selected resources for the task at hand. Finally, we discuss the results and possible implications for the design of multimodal search result presentation.

The emerging research field Search as Learning (SAL) investigates how the Web facilitates learning through modern information retrieval systems. SAL research requires significant amounts of data that capture both search behavior of users and their acquired knowledge in order to obtain conclusive insights or train supervised machine learning models. However, the creation of such datasets is costly and requires interdisciplinary efforts in order to design studies and capture a wide range of features. In this paper, we address this issue and introduce an extensive dataset based on a user study, in which 114 participants were asked to learn about the formation of lightning and thunder. Participants’ knowledge states were measured before and after Web search through multiple-choice questionnaires and essay-based free recall tasks. To enable future research in SAL-related tasks we recorded a plethora of features and person-related attributes. Besides the screen recordings, visited Web pages, and detailed browsing histories, a large number of behavioral features and resource features were monitored. We underline the usefulness of the dataset by describing three, already published, use cases.

The present paper reports on a Searching as Learning (SAL) study, with 115 university students learning about the formation of thunderstorms and lightning by searching the web. Participants' knowledge on the topic was measured before (t1) and after the learning phase (t2) with a free essay task. During the web search, the time participants spent on different information resources was measured, differentiating between text-dominated websites and videos. Furthermore, to examine the role of learners' cognitive abilities, their working memory capacity (WMC) and reading comprehension ability (RCA) were assessed. Results of a hierarchical linear regression analysis showed that after controlling for prior knowledge, WMC and RCA positively predicted students' learning outcome, as measured by the number of correct concepts included in essays composed after search. Moreover, the time spent on text-dominated websites was also associated with better learning outcomes. In contrast, the time spent watching videos was not beneficial. To conclude, our findings provide preliminary evidence that the time leaners spend on text-dominated websites and on videos might not contribute equally to the acquisition of conceptual knowledge in SAL tasks.