The paper describes the theoretical basis and methodology for research seeking to identify higher order cognitive activity occurring in students' information seeking and learning tasks with hypermedia. It reviews difficulties arising from the inconsistency among schemes of cognitive analysis, and of articulating such schemes closely with accounts of the desirable attributes of graduates in employment, where the display of higher order skills is expected. It concludes that such analyses of learning with hypermedia must, despite these problems, be guided by more holistic theoretical accounts of thinking, and constantly adapt methodologies to avoid reliance on over-simplified models. Technology and thinking: Tracking the relationshipsA focus on learning with hypermedia A research project at Griffith University, Cognitive Processing in Hypermedia Settings Frampton 1993, 1994) has investigated the incidence of categories of thinking among users of hypermedia applications. Our primary interest has been in student learning from multimedia and hypermedia, so the possible relationships between the nature and features of these technologies and students' thinking needed to be revealed and understood as clearly as possible, because good thinking is necessarily an important outcome for universities.This entailed due consideration of higher education's current concern with the generic, transferable cognitive capacities ideally desired of graduates, and with the means of aligning the development of these capacities in the course of undergraduate studies with lifelong learning approaches and professional attributes and attitudes valued in employment.

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