ABSTRACT

The widespread development of digital, linked, text-based information repositories has prompted considerable research on learning from hypertext. The proliferation of the Internet has made the World Wide Web, with its hyperlinked Web pages, wikis, and blogs, the preferred information source for 21st-century world citizens. As we increasingly rely on hypertext-based information resources. It is critical that we focus on how reading hyperlinked text affects the learning process as we increasingly rely on hypertext-based informational resources. Grounded in cognitive flexibility theory and the construction—integration model, this chapter is focused on current empirical research that furthers our understanding of learning from hypertext. Clearly, one’s goals for reading a given hypertext play an important role in determining what is learned from it. The degree to which these goals are self or externally imposed, the specificity of goals, and the interactions among goals, system structure, and individual characteristics of learners all influence what is learned when reading hypertext. Further, strategies readers use to navigate through hypertext content, and the inclusion of 200navigational scaffolds, also appear to influence learning. Finally, individual characteristics, such as prior knowledge and cognitive style, also appear to affect learning from hypertext, while metacognitive aspects such as active knowledge construction and self-regulated learning, coupled with coherence-promoting hypertext design elements, appear to hold great promise for future research.