Knowledge seeking behaviours refer to an individual’s first actions performed once they recognise a problem derived from uncertainty. There are a variety of factors affecting knowledge seeking behaviours on the internet (Small and Grabowski, 1992). Broadly speaking, these factors could be related to types of a task, features of an environment and user characteristics. In the context of user characteristics, it could be assumed that knowledge seeking behaviours should be considered along with the individuals’ creativity and need for cognition. Creativity refers to thinking process which requires individuals to think beyond ‘what is known’ when there is uncertainty. Creativity takes an important role in knowledge seeking given individuals engage in a process which signifies extrapolative, discursive thinking and which is based on emergence of diverse opinions and ideas. As for need for cognition, it is a term borrowed from Cohen et al. (1955) and described as a need to make sense of relevant situations and make reasonable the experiential world, in other words, as conceptualized by Cacioppo and Petty (1982) it is a wish to engage in activities which require cognitive efforts. The research studies conducted in the fields of health, psychology, politics and social cognition showed that the differences in individuals’ need for cognition help us understand an individual’s knowledge acquisition and processing which are guided by their perception, judgement and behaviours (Cacioppo, Petty, Feinstein and Jarvis, 1996). Furthermore, it was revealed in the experimental research studies focusing around effects of need for cognition that the individuals with a high need for cognition pay attention to the main points of the issues rather than simple inferences, for instance, whether the communicator is attractive or not (Haugtvedt, Petty and Cacioppo, 1992 cited by Tsfati and Capella, 2005).  In their study, Nair and Ramnarayan (2000) showed that individuals with a high need for cognition tend to collect more information about a complicated problem in which they engage.  

In summary, need for cognition and creativity have the potential to indicate an individual’s knowledge seeking behaviour and in that sense, it is worthwhile to investigate the relationships among them. From this point of departure, the aim of this research is to examine the teacher candidates’ creativity, need for cognition and knowledge seeking behaviours. We focus on the teacher candidates as they are the ‘knowledge constructors of the future’.  More specifically, we deal with the teacher candidates’ knowledge seeking behaviours on the web-based e-resources. Web based resources could be considered as rich information providers for knowledge seekers. However, individuals from a variety of backgrounds utilise the same e-resources while every individual has his or her particular way of knowledge processing. In that sense, it is important to examine how knowledge seeking behaviours of the users, teacher candidates in this research, could be patterned while utilising web-based e-resources given their diverse levels of creativity and need for cognition.  

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