Kevyn Collins-Thompson earns ACM CHIIR 2026 Test of Time Award

Kevyn Collins-Thompson, associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Information, has earned an ACM CHIIR 2026 Test of Time Award for his research examining how people learn through online search. 

The award recognizes his paper “Assessing Learning Outcomes in Web Search: A Comparison of Tasks and Query Strategies,” co-authored by Collins-Thompson, Soo Young Rieh, Carl C. Haynes and Rohail Syed. The paper was presented at the 2016 Association for Computing Machinery's Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval.

Test of time awards honor research that has demonstrated lasting influence in the years since its publication. For Collins-Thompson, the decade between the paper’s publication and its recognition makes the award especially meaningful.

“I feel that test of time awards are especially gratifying because when you have 10 years to evaluate the impact of something, the recognition has that much more depth,” he says. “You can point to the consequences of the work and everything that came afterward.”

The paper investigated how different online search strategies affect learning and how researchers might measure what someone learns while searching. Participants used one of three approaches: conducting a single search, conducting multiple searches or receiving results organized around a diverse range of related subtopics.

The researchers found that the third approach, known as intrinsically diverse ranking, resulted in the highest percentage of participants achieving both factual and conceptual knowledge gains. This method anticipates different aspects of a person’s information need and presents useful documents covering each direction they might explore.

The paper has since become foundational to the field known as “search as learning,” which examines search engines as environments in which people build knowledge.

“I think the paper’s larger impact was that it helped reorient the field toward thinking about search engines as cognitive learning environments rather than simply tools for retrieving documents,” Collins-Thompson says. “It helped spur research into how we track people’s knowledge and scaffold their interactions with search results.”

The research has a personal origin. While working at Microsoft Research, Collins-Thompson came home one day to find his 8-year-old daughter in tears as she tried to research sea urchins for a school report. Her search results were filled with scientific papers she couldn’t understand.

“I thought, ‘Here I am working on web search, and my own daughter can’t use it,’” he says. “It was a personal problem that I could begin tackling.”

That experience led him to build reading difficulty into search rankings and shaped his broader interest in designing search systems that support learning.

“This paper was one of my all-time favorite projects,” he says. “We’re grateful for this recognition, and it’s also been a wonderful opportunity to look back on this work.” 

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Learn more about Kevyn Collins-Thompson’s research on learning by visiting his UMSI faculty profile.