This paper reports the findings of a mixed methods study that examines how 9th grade science teachers engage in online searches for inquiry-based activities in two different search engines---Google and the Digital Library for Earth System Education. The goal of this dissertation was two-fold: (a) to detail science teacher search behaviors during a realistic online search task related to their teaching, and (b) the effect of search engine affordances on those search practices. At the center of the dissertation activities were an experimental task and talk-aloud protocols of the teachers engaged in the task. The task itself asked teacher participants to search for earth science activities linking the concept of volcanism to plate tectonics. In addition to the experiment and talk-aloud protocol, a demographic survey, content knowledge evaluation, inquiry-based activity evaluation, and post-task structured interview were conducted.

Because substantial prior research in non-educational areas has shown that task domain influences search behaviors, it was expected that the science teaching domain would have its own particular influence on teachers' online information seeking. The concept of task domain was developed in terms of an information seeking framework developed by Marchionini (1995). The Marchionini (1995) model of information seeking was used as a guiding framework for the dissertation investigations.

The objectives of this dissertation were to characterize the behaviors and products of real-world online information seeking by 9^th grade science teachers, and to inform the work of educational software designers.