Evaluation of the NSDL and Google for Obtaining Pedagogical Resources

We describe an experiment that measures the pedagogical usefulness of the results returned by the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) and Google. Eleven public school teachers from the state of Virginia (USA) were used to evaluate a set of 38 search terms and search results based on the Standards of Learning (SOL) for Virginia Public Schools. Evaluations of search results were obtained from the NSDL (572 evaluations) and Google (650 evaluations). In our experiments, teachers ranked the links returned by Google as more relevant to the SOL than the links returned by the NSDL. Furthermore, Google's ranking of educational material also showed some correlation with expert judgments