The Relationship of Online Academic Information Search Behaviors and Internet-Specific Epistemological Beliefs with Taiwanese High School Students

Online help seeking has become a common skill in human's daily life and thus, how to use the strategy to search information becomes an important issue. The main purpose of this study was to inspect the relationships between Internet-specific epistemic beliefs and online academic information search behaviors among high school students using the Internet to search the learning information. Four hundred and eighty-one Taiwanese high school students were recruited in this study. To explore the high school students' Internet search behaviors, two questionnaires were adopted: Internet-specific epistemological beliefs (ISEB) and online academic information search behaviors (OAISB). Through exploratory factor analysis (EFA), the results showed that four dimensions of ISEB (“self-source”, “uncertainty”, “justification”, and “structure of knowledge”) and six dimensions of OAISB (“multiple sources”, “authority”, “content”, “technical”, “elaboration”, and “match”) were grouped into four and six factors respectively in accordance with the coefficient. The Path analysis with structural equation modeling (SEM) was further conducted to clarify the relationships between ISEB and OAISB of high school students. The results revealed that ISEB were related to OAISB. The high school students tended to search online academic information according to their known knowledge and then visit multiple websites, especially the official websites, to verify the correctness of the information.