Effects of Question Complexity and Reader Strategies on Adults’ Hypertext Comprehension

Abstract

AbstractWhen adults read a hypertext for the goal of answering specific questions, they are mostly unsuccessful. Hypertext is a different kind of text structure for readers who may find it difficult to use traditional text strategies. Thirty adults read a binary-tree-structured hypertext to answer three 2-part questions on the topic of cosmology. Results confirmed the following hypotheses: (a) successful readers chose only important nodes to read, (b) questions that required more node traversal were more difficult to answer, and (c) successful and unsuccessful readers had different hypertext reading strategies. Although most readers found the two-part questions difficult to answer, the more successful readers chose important hypertext nodes more often and read them relatively longer than unsuccessful readers. In addition, questions posed to the hypertext readers differed in difficulty as a direct result of the complexity of their traversal paths. Readers who adopted a depth-first search strategy were more...