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 Windowsbased 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.
1969), and information needs (Walter, 1994;Goss, 1997) may impact their information-seeking behavior in IR systems. Use of the Web in schools and the increased access to the Web by children at home raise many issues concerning information-seeking and use, the roles of school librarians and teachers in educating and training, and how well designers of Web engines provide user-centered interfaces that facilitate children's information-seeking.
The search engines facilitate seeking information on the Web. Presently, there are over 500 engines, but only three are designed for children: Yahooligans! (http://www.yahooligans. com), Ask Jeeves for Kids (http://www.ajkids.com), and Super Snooper (http://www.supersnooper.com). Yahooligans! began in 1994 as an engine and directory designed for children ages seven to twelve (Yahooligans!, 1998). Ask Jeeves for Kids was developed in 1996 as an engine and meta-engine; the age group is undefined (Ask Jeeves, Inc., 1998). Super Snooper is a newcomer to the Web and gained recognition in early 1998. The engine does not indicate the age group for which it is designed (Cool Sites Network, Inc., 1999).
While the widespread introduction of OPACs and CD-ROM databases spawned several end-user studies, research on end-users of Web search engines has only started to emerge. This study is part of a research project (Bilal, in progress) that examined children's cognitive, physical, and affective behaviors as they used Yahooligans!
The main purposes of this study were:
โข To examine children's cognitive, physical, and affective behaviors as they sought information on a fact-based search task in Yahooligans!, โข To measure children's success in finding information on a fact-based search task. โข To compare the cognitive and physical behaviors between children who succeeded in finding the desired information in Yahooligans! and those who failed. โข To develop a new measure for quantifying traversal effec-