Learning from hypertext: navigation, comprehension, and working memory in university students

Despite hypertext research taking place for around three decades, questions remain about the reading processes involved in this format, whether individual reader differences are beneficial or detrimental to learning, and how to facilitate navigation and comprehension.

Three introductory chapters review the current research literature on reading comprehension across study media, and explore the cognitive processes for reading and navigating texts in the digital era. In four experiments, this thesis investigates hypertext learning in university students, focusing on navigation, comprehension, and working memory. The experiments find that deep, inferential, reading comprehension is weaker in hypertext than in print text, with low prior knowledge and lower working memory ability hypertext readers being especially disadvantaged.