Applying Text Comprehension and Active Reading Principles to Adaptive Hyperbooks

We show how cognitive and educational research and theory from the areas of text comprehension and “active reading” strategies can be applied to the domain of hypermedia textbooks (“hyperbooks”). We describe our work on the MetaLinks system, which is an authoring tool and web-based server for adaptive hyperbooks. In this paper we describe how findings from text comprehension research are incorporated into MetaLinks design features, and summarize formative studies of students using MetaLinks hyperbooks.