Auteurs : Jerome Dinet ¹; Robin Vivian ¹; Brigitte Simonnot ²

• 1 Equipe Transdisciplinaire sur l'Interaction et la Cognition
• 2 Centre de Recherche sur les Médiations

Two experimental studies aim at describing the impacts of pair interaction and affective factors during the process of collaborative search for information on the World Wide Web when end-users are young learners recruited from Grade 3. In three successive sessions, students were asked to find answers to questions related to medieval history on the Internet. In these three sessions, students were asked to find these answers alone (condition "Alone"), or with a friend (condition "Affinity +"), or with another pupil who was not a friend (condition "Affinity -"). Several significant results have been obtained: (1) pairs retrieved effectively more answers, more correct answers, and were more efficient than singles; (2) pairs composed of children without social affinity retrieved more answers, more correct answers and were more efficient than pairs composed of friends; (3) pairs composed of friends produced significantly more irrelevant queries than pairs composed of children without social affinity; (4) pairs composed of children without social affinity are engaged in a great deal of consensus seeking, compared with the pairs composed of friends.