Investigating the Effect of Implicit Browsing Behaviour on Students’ Performance in a Task Specific Context

This paper focuses on how students access web pages in a task specific information retrieval. An investigation on how students search the web for their current needs was carried out and students' behavioural characteristics as they surf the internet to answer some given online multiple choice questions was collected. Twenty three students participated in the study and a number of behavioural characteristics were captured. Camtasia studio 7 was used to record their searching activity. The result shows that 328 web pages were visited by the students, and among the parameters captured, the time spent on the search task has a stronger correlation with the students' performance than any other captured parameter. The time spent on a document can be used as a good implicit indicator to infer learner's interest in a context based recommender system.