This study describes the career exploratory behaviors of high school and college students and offers a typology of users of a Web-delivered computer career guidance application. Access to the records of 87,293 high school and college students allowed for the identification and replication of three emergent types of users: a general browser, a focused user, and an in-depth user. Exit surveys of subsequent career exploratory behavior outside of the web application for a subset of users (n = 1655) helped to clarify differences in exploration by user type, with in-depth and focused users more likely to seek additional information and to talk with others about their career decisions. Our findings reinforce the importance of focusing student behavior during Web-based guidance and have implications for future research on the ecology of career exploration via the Web.
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