Research On The Cognitive Ability Of Academic Information Retrieval From A Perspective Of Expertise

Expertise is a special skill in one particular field owned by an expert, which is embodied in his rich experience acquired in his long-term education, training and practice. The main research trend of expertise has focused on the expertise in different fields. But the researches on the expertise of the academic information retrieval are less. The so-called academic information retrieval is an exploratory search, where a user, relying his subject background knowledge and the characteristics of information, acquires the academic information finally by means of a continuous interaction with a retrieval system. At present, the researches of academic information retrieval are mostly concerned with behavior level, hardly with cognitive mechanism.This study consists of three parts.The first part is about the construction and survey of " Scale of cognitive ability of academic information retrieval", in which the main factors including attention, memory and thing ability that have effect on the cognitive ability of academic information retrieval are proposed by explanation of the behaviors of academic information retrieval and the cognitive ability effect on their retrieval. Furthermore, the "Scale of evaluation of cognitive ability of academic information retrievals" is worked out depending on the user interviews, expert advice and the analysis on the influential evaluation index of information retrieval. The scale of evaluation with three dimensions of retrieval attention, retrieval memory and retrieval thinking including 17 testing items " is built after the initial test and result analysis, confirmatory analysis, reliability analysis on 567 subjects. Then, the tests on 728 college students and 141 professional college retrieval persons are carried out based on "Scale of cognitive of academic information retrieval" to explore the differences of their cognitive abilities in academic information retrieval with different classifications(sex, subject and grade), differences of their searching frequency, differences of cognitive ability in academic information retrieval with different retrieval knowledge acquirement, and differences of cognitive ability of academic information retrieval between novices, intermediates and experts.The second part is the behavior experiment on the cognitive ability of academic information retrieval. In a real situation, the behavior observation is adopted on 15 subjects(5 novices,5 intermediates and 5 experts) with single factor experimental design to research the behavior characteristics of three groups of participants through action observation combined with background thinking method, when they complete their tasks, including the overall results of task completing, the characteristics of the representation of the information demanded, the features of the interaction with the retrieval system, and the selections of the retrieval results, which is concentrated on exploration of the features of the recall and extraction of knowledge, the strategies of problem solving, thinking mode in different participants with different background.The third part is the experiment of eye movement on the cognitive ability of academic information retrieval, involving selection of 38 participants(12 novices,14 intermediate,12 experts), adoption of 3(retrieval level:expert, intermediate, novice) times 3(task type:simple task, complex task related with subject, complex task with subject independent) of mixed experimental design, to survey the features of eye movement in their interaction with the retrieval system, including the general characteristics of eye movement, the characteristics of eye movement of retrieval interface processing, characteristics of eye movement of the retrieval result page processing, with being concentrated on the features of their selective attention and cognitive processing load.The main conclusions of this study are:(1) There are significant differences in cognitive ability of academic information retrieval among different grades ranging from first year undergraduate to postgraduate period for master degree. And the difference varies among different grades and dimensions.(2) There is an interaction effect between the relevant retrieval knowledge, retrieval frequency and academic information retrieval cognitive ability. For the experts, whether they have the background knowledge has no significant effect on retrieval quality but it does affect the retrieval efficiency. For the skilled, whether they have the background knowledge may affect both retrieval quality and retrieval efficiency.(3) Among the experts, the skilled and the novices, there are extremely significant distinctions either in total or in various dimensions such as retrieval attention, retrieval memory, retrieval thinking.(4) On the quality of completing the task, there is a tendency that the differences among the experts, the skilled and the novices increase as the difficulty of the task enhances. And intermediate effect begins to emerge in the skilled ones in discipline-unrelated complex task level.(5) On the efficiency of completing the task, in general, there are extremely significant differences among the experts, the skilled and the novices. And the experts are superior to the skilled, the skilled superior to novices. There is a tendency that the overall differences among the experts, the skilled and the novices decrease as the difficulty of the task increases.(6)The main cognitive characteristics in academic information retrieval of the expert, the skilled and the novices are:the experts are adopting task-driven search strategies, with good selective attention, so their search process is simple and effective. The experts have a fixed "template" in the completion of the task, and have formed skilled memory in this field; therefore they can effectively solve the problem in specific situations, which can be classified as the flexible thinking mode. The skilled are also using task-driven search strategies, with good selective attention, but their search quality and efficiency may be influenced by the task difficulty. The "template" of the skilled are blocks, which scatter in the intellectual structure of the searching field and are not connected to form a meaningful "template". But these blocks enable the skilled to solve problems by targeted trying strategy, which belongs to the empirical thinking mode. The novices are employing feature-driven search strategy, with poor selective attention, so their search process is lengthy and inefficient. The memory of the novices in related field is sporadic and even missing. Thus, facing the same situation, they are unable to transfer, associate and find solution in trying as the skilled do. So their strategy, a non-targeted trying strategy, is often ineffective, which belongs to blind thinking mode.