An Exploratory Factor Analytic Approach to Understand Design Features for Academic Learning Environments

Subjective relevance (SR) is defined as usefulness of documents for tasks. This paper enhances objective relevance and tackles its limitations by conducting a quantitative study to understand students’ perceptions of features for supporting evaluations of subjective relevance of documents. Data was analyzed by factor analysis to identify groups of features that supported students’ document evaluations during IR interaction stages and provide design guidelines for an IR interface supporting students’ document evaluations. Findings suggested an implied order of importance amongst groups of features for each interaction stage. The paper concludes by discussing groups of features, its implied order of importance, and support for information seeking activities to provide design implications for IR interfaces supporting SR.