The Study of Difference in the Information Searching Behavior of High School Students regarding to their Experience and Spatial Intelligence in Simple and Complex Search Tasks

  This research aims to identify the difference in the information searching behavior of high school students regarding to their experience and spatial intelligence in simple and complex tasks. This is a fundamental research following a comparative research design, A questionnaire was used to collect demographic information and measure the experience. Also, the method of view and analysis of users' transaction reports was another tool for gathering data. To measure spatial intelligence, Ekstrom, French, Harman and Durman (1976) Tests were used. the population of research consisted of 90 female students (14 and 15 years old) of the 8th and 9th grades who studied in the school of Shiraz University. Participants searched two search tasks on Roshd and Jostar educational websites, and the findings of their searching behavior were recorded.
Findings: The results of the study showed that average of four variables of the searching behavior including the query length, the reformulation, the result pages and the links in the simple tasks, were less than the complex ones. Also, students with low spatial intelligence have a lower average of these four variables than medium and high school students. In other words, users with medium and high spatial intelligence had more interaction with websites.
Conclustion: Investigating the information searching behavior of students and it's affecting factors help information systems' designers to design websites that are compatible with users' needs according to their features. Also, personalized retrieval systems can be create which cognitive features such as spatial intelligence were considered