All That Matters: Revisiting Children’s Concept of Relevance in Primary School Contex
Diletta Micol Tobia, Hrishita Chakrabarti, Maria Soledad Pera, and Monica Landoni. 2026. “All That Matters: Revisiting Children’s Concept of Relevance in Primary School Context”. In Advances in Information Retrieval – 48th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2026), Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 16485, pp 271–288. Springer. DOI:10.1007/978-3-032-21324-2_23.
Abstract
The concept of relevance in Information Retrieval (IR) has been extensively studied. However, most mainstream IR models have been developed with adult users in mind, assuming cognitive maturity and autonomous interaction. Younger searchers differ in cognitive abilities, information needs, and digital knowledge, which shape how they judge relevance. This study explores how children interpret and determine relevance in primary school search contexts, also considering teachers’ perspectives. The findings highlight both alignment and divergence, contributing to the design of more inclusive and context-aware IR system