Investigation of Students' Information Seeking Behaviour

The main purpose of this study is to investigate Students' information seeking behaviour in the area of computer science and to develop a customize search tool to support their learning activities. The customize search tool will reduce the time students studying a particular course spend on searching the internet for information related to their learning activity. In order to investigate this issue and to support learning, data was collected through questionnaire, Web browser log history and video capturing. Twenty three students participated in a survey in which screen recording software (Camtasia 7 Studio) was used to automatically capture their online searching activities. The participants were given an online quiz to freely surf the Internet and answer. The URLs used by each of the participants was collected from the web browser and analysis was carried out to obtain the common URLs. The other parameters measured include: The time spent in answering each question (Time), the number of times the mouse was clicked while searching the web for answers to each question (Clicks), the number of websites visited for each of the questions (NW), the Change Focus between the online quiz and browser in attempting each question (CF), the number of times a query is reformulated in attempting to answer each question (QR) and the performance of the participants in attempting each question (Score).