Effect of high-level content organizers on hypertext learning
Highlights
► Route and survey representations of the formal structure are more accurate with a map. ► Memory of the position of high-level pages is less accurate with a list. ► Organizers are used more frequently than the empty page for orientation purposes. ► Time on opening page grows when it exposes more orientation supporting information.
Introduction
For about two decades, people have been increasingly reading and interacting with electronic texts. New technologies and electronic devices make it possible for more and more readers and learners to easily reach millions of multimedia documents. In developed economies, electronic multimedia files are gradually replacing printed books, newspapers and documents. The digitalization of texts changes not only the way we access to them, but their inherent structure. The well known linear printed representations of information are progressively substituted by documents organized in non-linear virtual networks.
Researchers have been producing more and more empirical evidence proving that reading practices of electronic documents rely on capacities that are not involved in the same way in printed text comprehension. The challenges that readers face using electronic displays was hallmarked by the phenomena of disorientation and cognitive overload in the early literature (Conklin, 1997, Foss, 1988, Kim and Hirtle, 1995). Recent studies demonstrate the cognitive surcharge of hypertextual learning activity (Amadieu and Tricot, 2006, DeStefano and LeFevre, 2007, Rouet, 2006, Zumbach and Mohraz, 2008). Several explanations were proposed by these studies for the surcharge phenomenon – e.g.: small letters, handling the peripherals, missing markers, no superstructure, frequent loss of context. One more possible explanation is that readers of digital texts have to keep memories of the arrangement of informational units in the electronic environment in order to efficiently plan their trajectories.
For Kintsch (1998), text comprehension is defined as the construction of a mental representation of semantic content, and the surface features of the texts are quickly eliminated. Meanwhile, hypertext theorists assume the intervention of mental mapping of the formal structure in hypertext learning (Edwards and Hardman, 1989, Juvina and Van Oostendorp, 2008, Nilsson and Mayer, 2002, Padovani and Lansdale, 2003, Pazzaglia et al., 2008, van Hooijdonk et al., 2006, Vörös et al., 2009).
Research evidence suggest that both individual and design factors are influencing the mental mapping process of nonlinear textual arrangements (Amadieu et al., 2009, Padovani and Lansdale, 2003, Pazzaglia et al., 2008, Vörös et al., 2009). The purpose of this study is to provide additional evidence concerning the effect of different high-level organizers on the mental representation of hypertextual structures.
Section snippets
Navigation during hypertext reading
Since hypertext pages appear on the user interface only at the time of viewing, in contrast to printed book, magazines and other materials, hypertexts are never entirely visible to the users. Moreover, unlike single linear texts, hypertexts present several paths between the pages, allowing for each reader to construct individual pathways. For these reasons, a hypertextual network of pages can be defined at two levels: the informational content level and the layout level. The informational
Effect of high-level organizers on navigation
Since hypertext is not linear, its formal structure is often represented in form of high-level graphic organizers. On the text comprehension level, a graphic organizer is supposed to act as concept map. At the same time, for the orientation activity it can function as spatial map. Thus, both components of hypertext navigation – text comprehension and spatial orientation – are expected to be influenced by graphic organizers.
Experiment
In the present study, we investigate the effect of different organizers on the encoding of the link structure and semantic content during an exploratory navigation of a hypertext. More specifically, we examine the effects of two content organizers – a hierarchical graphical map defining the formal layout of hypertext pages and an alphabetical list of page titles – compared to a situation where no navigational aid is provided.
We suppose that in order to navigate efficiently, hypertext readers
Discussion and conclusion
The main objective of this study was to investigate the effects of high-level content organizers on the mental representation of hypertext structure. The participants were divided into three balanced groups according to their visuo-spatial and verbal memory capacity. Participants had to read and memorize the content of a touristic website. Navigation was helped by a spatial map, a list of page titles or there was not available navigational aid during the reading. In the post test phase the
Acknowledgments
The research presented here was supported in part by a grant from the French Ministry of Foreign affairs to the first author.
The authors thank Régis Gaufreteau for its participation in data collection and analysis.
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