Visualizing Online Search Processes for Information Literacy Education

Online searching happens today mostly on personal devices and through personalized accounts. Information Literacy and online searching education suffer from the invisibility of online searching behaviors, which makes process-oriented feedback virtually impossible in class. Thanks to the instructional deployment of insights and technologies developed in a research project, we designed and delivered a class session based on the visualization of the students’ search processes, involving 535 secondary school students and 16 teachers. The analysis of the data collected via a post-session survey that included both quantitative and qualitative items along with feedback from the teachers provides initial evidence of the effectiveness of this novel approach.