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In this work, we discuss the findings emerging from co-design sessions between children ages 6 to 11 and adults, which were conducted to advance knowledge on how to best support children using well-known search tools for online information discovery. Specifically, we argue that by leveraging scaffolding, gamification techniques, and design choices via an application, it is possible to enhance children’s habits related to query formulation. Outcomes from this preliminary exploration reveal that gameplay incentives (e.g. levels, points, and other incentives like customization) are needed and effective in motivating further interaction with the application, which in turn leads to further utilization of the scaffolding needed to positively impact query formulation. 

Children often interact with search engines within a classroom context to complete assignments or discover new information. To successfully identify relevant resources among those presented on a search engine results page (SERP), users must first be able to comprehend the text included in SERP snippets. While this task may be straightforward for an adult user, children may encounter obstacles in terms of readability and comprehension when attempting to navigate a SERP. Previous research has demonstrated the positive impact of including visual cues on a SERP as relevance signals to guide children toward appropriate resources. In this work, we explore the effect of supplying visual cues related to readability and text difficulty on children’s (ages 6-12) navigation of a SERP. Using quantitative data collected from user-interface interactions and qualitative data gathered from participant interviews, we analyze the impact of these visual cues on children’s selection of results on a SERP when carrying out information discovery tasks. 

Information Retrieval (IR) systems have a wide range of impacts on *consumers*. We offer maps to help identify goals IR systems could---or should---strive for, and guide the process of *scoping how to gauge a wide range of consumer-side impacts and the possible interventions needed to address these effects. Grounded in prior work on scoping algorithmic impact efforts, our goal is to promote and facilitate research that (1) is grounded in impacts on information consumers, contextualizing these impacts in the broader landscape of positive and negative consumer experience; (2) takes a broad view of the possible means of changing or improving that impact, including non-technical interventions; and (3) uses operationalizations and strategies that are well-matched to the technical, social, ethical, legal, and other dimensions of the specific problem in question. 

The role that technology plays in supporting children at school and at home is more prominent than ever before due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. This has prompted us to focus the 6th International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children \& Recommender and Information Retrieval Systems (KidRec) workshop on what the lasting changes will be to the design and development of child information retrieval systems. After two years, are information retrieval systems used more in and out of the classroom? Are they more interactive, more or less personalized? What is the impact on the research and business community? Are there long-term and unexpected changes on the design, ethics, and algorithms? The primary goal of our workshop continues to be to build community by bringing together researchers, practitioners, and other stakeholders from various backgrounds and disciplines to understand and advance information retrieval systems for children. 

Music is an important part of childhood development, with online music listening platforms being a significant channel by which children consume music. Children’s offline music listening behavior has been heavily researched, yet relatively few studies explore how their behavior manifests online. In this paper, we use data from LastFM 1 Billion and the Spotify API to explore online music listening behavior of children, ages 6–17, using education levels as lenses for our analysis. Understanding the music listening behavior of children can be used to inform the future design of recommender systems. 

In this paper, we take a step towards understanding how to design search engine results pages (SERP) that encourage children’s engagement as they seek for online resources. For this, we conducted a participatory design session to enable us to elicit children’s preferences and determine what children (ages 6–12) find lacking in more traditional SERP. We learned that children want more dynamic means of navigating results and additional ways to interact with results via icons. We use these findings to inform the design of a new SERP interface, which we denoted CHIRP. To gauge the type of engagement that a SERP incorporating interactive elements–CHIRP–can foster among children, we conducted a user study at a public school. Analysis of children’s interactions with CHIRP, in addition to responses to a post-task survey, reveals that adding additional interaction points results in a SERP interface that children prefer, but one that does not necessarily change engagement levels through clicks or time spent on SERP. 

Spellchecking functionality embedded in existing search tools can assist children by offering a list of spelling alternatives when a spelling error is detected. Unfortunately, children tend to generally select the first alternative when presented with a list of options, as opposed to the one that matches their intent. In this paper, we describe a study we conducted with 191 children ages 6-12 in order to offer empirical evidence of: (1) their selection habits when identifying spelling suggestions that match the word they meant to type, and (2) the degree of influence multimodal cues, i.e., synthesized speech and images, have in prompting children to select the correct spelling suggestion. The results from our study reveal that multimodal cues, primarily synthesized speech, have a positive impact on the children's ability to identify their intended word from a list of spelling suggestions. 

We present StoryTime, a book recommender for children. Our web-based recommender is co-designed with children and uses images to elicit their preferences. By building on existing solutions related to both visual interfaces and book recommendation strategies for children, StoryTime can generate suggestions without historical data or adult guidance. We discuss the benefits of StoryTime as a starting point for further research exploring the cold start problem, incorporating historical data, and needs related to children as a complex audience to enhance the recommendation process. 

As children search the internet for materials, they o en turn to search engines that, unfortunately, o er children li le support as they formulate queries to initiate the search process or examine resources for relevance. While some solutions have been proposed to address this, inherent to this issue is the need to evaluate the e ectiveness of these solutions. We posit that the evaluation of the diverse aspects involved in the search process – from query suggestion generation to resource retrieval – requires a complex, multi-faceted approach that draws on evaluation methods utilized in human-computer interaction, information retrieval, natural language processing, education, and psychology.