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<Paper uid="W05-0205">
  <Title>Towards Intelligent Search Assistance for Inquiry-Based Learning</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Major science education standards call on students to engage in Online Inquiry-Based Learning where they pose scientific Driving Questions (DQ), plan their search, collect and analyze online information, and synthesize their findings into an argument. In collaboration with National Science Digital Library (NSDL), we are developing an integrated Online Inquiry-Based Learning Environment (OIBLE), called IdeaKeeper (Quintana and Zhang, 2004), to help learners fulfill the promise of OIBL. IdeaKeeper is among the first reported OIBLE that integrates various online search engines with support for inquiry planning, information search, analysis and synthesis.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Our observation reveals that searching is one of the bottlenecks impeding students' learning experience. Students demonstrate various problems in search. First, they repeatedly search for very similar keywords on search engines. Second, they are usually unable to develop effective search terms. Many search keywords students generate are either too broad or too narrow. Although learners have specific search purposes, many times they are unable to express the purposes in keyword-based queries. In fact, by analyzing the search logs, we found that the average query length is only about 2 words. In such typical cases in OIBL, informative contexts are not presented in queries, and thus the requests become ambiguous. As a result, the search engines may not interpret the query as the learners intended to. Therefore, the results are usually not satisfactory. Given the selfregulated nature of OIBL and limited self-control skills of K-12 students, the problem is even more serious, as students may shift their focus off the task if they constantly fail to find relevant information for their DQ.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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