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Current approaches in automatic readability assessment have found success with the use of large language models and transformer architectures. These techniques lead to accuracy improvement, but they do not offer the interpretability that is uniquely required by the audience most often employing readability assessment tools: teachers and educators. Recent work that employs more traditional machine learning methods has highlighted the linguistic importance of considering semantic and syntactic characteristics of text in readability assessment by utilizing handcrafted feature sets. Research in Education suggests that, in addition to semantics and syntax, phonetic and orthographic instruction are necessary for children to progress through the stages of reading and spelling development; children must first learn to decode the letters and symbols on a page to recognize words and phonemes and their connection to speech sounds. Here, we incorporate this word-level phonemic decoding process into readability assessment by crafting a phonetically-based feature set for grade-level classification for English. Our resulting feature set shows comparable performance to much larger, semantically- and syntactically-based feature sets, supporting the linguistic value of orthographic and phonetic considerations in readability assessment. 

Designing for child-learning involves a number of stakeholders including, but not limited to: teachers, children, administrators, and families. A common approach used to design technologies is co-design. Yet, co-design frequently means different things for different stakeholders. Within the realm of education co-design can be used generally for any interaction with a stakeholder that can be used to guide or inform the design of the desired outcome (product or curriculum) -- often with different stakeholders separately and/or in very small groups (e.g. a group of teachers or 2-3 children, or a classroom if ``testing''). Within the field of child-computer interaction, designing technologies with and for children can involve children and other stakeholders in varying levels of involvement, although within the IDC community it is often a more substantial contribution. We posit that giving child stakeholders an authentic voice in the design of technologies is crucial to fully addressing stakeholder's needs. 

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. 

We introduce a re-ranking model that augments the functionality of standard search engines to aid classroom search activities for children (ages 6–11). This model extends the known listwise learning-to-rank framework by balancing risk and reward. Doing so enables the model to prioritize Web resources of high educational alignment, appropriateness, and adequate readability by analyzing the URLs, snippets, and page titles of Web resources retrieved by a mainstream search engine. Experimental results demonstrate the value of considering multiple perspectives inherent to the classroom when designing algorithms that can better support children's information discovery.