Ruth A. Palmquist
Assistant Professor
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
The University of Texas
Austin, Texas
E-mail: palmquist@uts.cc.utexas.edu

Cognitive Strategies in a Hyper-Linked Environment:
A Qualitative Exploration of Tools and Techniques for
Assessing Naive Users of the World Wide Web

ALISE 1996 Research Grant Report and Contributed Papers Session
Wednesday, February 12, 1997, 5:30pm - 7:00pm

The intent of the study was to determine the cognitive strategies used by new users of the Web to make sense of the rich visual hypermedia environment of the Web. Study participants were asked to search the World Wide Web after a sequence of instructional sessions had been given. The search session was recorded using Lotus ScreenCam which was able to capture verbal protocols along side the screen displays and navigational decisions made by each participant. The Web searches were initialized using the Netscape browser and the Yahoo search engine. The report focuses on the software and hardware used to gather the largely qualitative data, but also discussed are the techniques that evolved to evaluate the verbal and screen data.

The Embedded Figures Test was used to identify participants' perceptual style. The test determines whether individuals are perceptually field dependent or field independent. Field dependency seems to indicate a perceptual style in which the overall organization of the surrounding field and particular parts of the field are experienced as "fused." The field independent perceiver can experience the parts of a display as discrete from an organized ground. There is evidence that these perceptual tendencies are consistent over much of a young to middle-aged adult lifespan and that they correlate strongly with a host of other problem-solving dimensions.

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