How Do Active Reading Strategies Affect Learning Outcomes in Web Search?

Prior work in education research has shown that various active reading strategies, notably highlighting and note-taking, benefit learning outcomes. Most of these findings are based on observational studies where learners learn from a single document. In a Search as Learning (SAL) context where learners have to iteratively scan and explore a large number of documents to address their learning objective, the effect of these active reading strategies is largely unexplored. To address this research gap, we carried out a crowd-sourced user study, and explored the effects of different highlighting and note-taking strategies on learning during a complex, learning-oriented search task. Out of five hypotheses derived from the education literature we could confirm three in the SAL context. Our findings have important design implications on aiding learning through search. Learners can benefit from search interfaces equipped with active reading tools—but some learning strategies employing these tools are more effective than others. (This research has been supported by DDS (Delft Data Science) and NWO projects SearchX (639.022.722) and Aspasia (015.013.027).)