Children's use of the Yahooligans! Web search engine: I. Cognitive, physical, and affective behaviors on fact-based search tasks

This study reports on the first part of a research project that investigated children's cognitive, affective, and physical behaviors as they use the Yahooligans! search engine to find information on a specific search task. Twenty-two seventh-grade science children from a middle school located in Knoxville, Tennessee participated in the project. Their cognitive and physical behaviors were captured using Lotus ScreenCam, a Windows-based software package that captures and replays activities recorded in Web browsers, such as Netscape. Their affective states were captured via a one-on-one exit interview. A new measure called “Web Traversal Measure” was developed to measure children's “weighted” traversal effectiveness and efficiency scores, as well as their quality moves in Yahooligans! Children's prior experience in using the Internet/Web and their knowledge of the Yahooligans! interface were gathered via a questionnaire. The findings provided insights into children's behaviors and success, as their weighted traversal effectiveness and efficiency scores, as well as quality moves. Implications for user training and system design are discussed.