DETERMINING THE NAVIGATIONAL AIDS USE ON THE INTERNET: The Information Technologies Teacher Candidates’ Case

The Internet users who fail to cope with navigation may generally face various problems such as disorientation, distraction, low motivation and abondenment of information retrieval. Therefore, navigational aids are frequently used in today’s Web browsers and Web sites to help users navigate on the Internet. However, it is asserted that navigational aids are still not thoroughly understood and effectively used by Information Technologies Teacher candidates. The purpose of this research is, therefore, to determine the navigational aids use by Information Technologies Candidate Teachers during information retrieval process on the Internet. A three-section survey was developed for this purpose. In this survey research, Information Technologies Teacher Candidates’ use of navigational aids in Web sites and Web browsers, and the reasons for low use of navigational aids were investigated. The findings of the study revealed that the teacher candidates did not use bookmarks, Web maps, RSS and atom feeds sufficiently. Moreover, it was found out that the use of navigational aids by teacher candidates show variations according to the average Internet use.