As we seek both to improve public school education in high technology areas and to link libraries and classrooms on the “information superhighway, ” we need to understand more about children’s information searching abilities. We present results of four experiments conducted on four ver-sions of the Science Library Catalog (SLC), a Dewey deci-mal-based hierarchical browsing system implemented in HyperCard without a keyboard. The experiments were conducted over a 3-year period at three sites, with four da-tabases, and with comparisons to two different keyword online catalogs. Subjects were ethnically and culturally di-verse children aged 9 through 12; with 32 to 34 children participating in each experiment. Children were provided explicit instruction and reference materials for the key-word systems but not for the SLC. The number of search topics matched was comparable across all systems and all experiments; search times were comparable, though they varied among the four SLC versions and between the two

The field of children's testimony is in turmoil, but a resolution to seemingly intractable debates now appears attainable. In this review, we place the current disagreement in historical context and describe psychological and legal views of child witnesses held by scholars since the turn of the 20th century. Although there has been consistent interest in children's suggestibility over the past century, the past 15 years have been the most active in terms of the number of published studies and novel theorizing about the causal mechanisms that underpin the observed findings. A synthesis of this research posits three "families " of factors—cognitive, social, and biological—that must be considered if one is to understand seemingly contradictory interpretations of the findings. We conclude that there are reliable age differences in suggestibility but that even very young children are capable of recalling much that is forensically relevant. Findings are discussed in terms of the role of expert witnesses. Since the turn of the century, psycholegal scholars have examined the suggestibility of children's testimony in an effort to determine whether they would be credible witnesses. A major issue in this research concerns the degree to which heightened

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