How adolescents navigate Wikipedia to answer questions / ¿Cómo navegan los adolescentes en Wikipedia para contestar preguntas?

Abstract

In one experiment, we explored how high school students use hyperlink relevance cues while they navigate to answer questions from hypertexts. Current evidence has shown that students may navigate by either performing a deep semantic analysis of the relationship between the question and the existing hyperlinks, or by matching words in the question to words in the hyperlink labels. We focused on how students combine both cues during navigation, and how comprehension skills relate to the use of such cues. Our study revealed that 14 year old students (N = 53) selected hyperlinks by relying to a similar degree on both word matching and semantic overlap. Furthermore, when there was a conflict between an irrelevant link cued via word matching and a relevant link only cued through semantic overlap, students’ comprehension skills facilitated their initial selection of an informative relevant link. To conclude, we discuss the implications of these results for current models of hypertext navigation.