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The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to develop a visualized search system utilizing graphical images to represent the story elements and concepts to help elementary students describe and seek their desired storybooks; and second, to explore the effect of the proposed visualized search system on elementary students’ tactics, success, and motivation for seeking storybooks.

A quasi-experimental approach was conducted with a sample of 61 elementary students in this study. The students’ tactics, motivation and the success of their storybook searching were addressed as dependent variables for further comparisons of the visualized searching system and a conventional keyword searching system.

The results revealed that the students in the experimental group exhibited more frequent tactics and greater motivation for storybook searching than those in the control group. Further χ² analysis indicated a significant relationship between the searching interface and the success of the students’ storybook searching.

This paper proposes a new visual search approach which allows young children to search for storybooks by describing an intended storybook in terms of its characters, objects, or the background colors of the cover page. The findings provide some evidence of the effectiveness of the visualized searching interface in terms of promoting young children’s learning through storybook searching and reading activities.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how young children interact with a visualized search interface to search for storybooks by assembling the provided visual searching items and to explore the difference in visual search behaviours and strategies exhibited by pre-schoolers and second-graders.

The visualized search interface was used to help young children search for storybooks by dragging-and-dropping story characters, scene objects and colour icons to perform search queries. Twenty pre-schoolers and 20 second-graders were asked to finish a search task through the visualized search interface. Their activities and successes in performing visual searches were logged for later analysis. Furthermore, in-depth interviews were also conducted to research their cognitive strategies exhibited while formulating visual search queries.

Young children with different grades adopted different cognitive strategies to perform visual searching. In contrast to the pre-schoolers who performed visual searching by personal preference, the second-graders could exercise visual searching accompanied with relatively high-order thinking. Young children may also place different foci on the storybook structure to deal with conditional storybook queries. The pre-schoolers tended to address the characters in the story, whereas the second-graders paid much attention to the aspects of scene and colour.

This paper describes a new visual search approach allowing young children to search for storybooks by describing an intended storybook in terms of its characters, scenes or the background colours, which provides valuable indicators to inform researchers of how pre-schoolers and second-graders formulate concepts to search for storybooks.