03-03-2008
Cognitive Science is FASCINATING
It never fails to amaze me how interesting I find the psychological/cognitive science aspect of education. I barely passed freshman psychology with a “D”.
Today, I stumbled upon this article on hyperlinks and how they effect learning. As I read, I took notes in a new blog post - there’s so much that applies to teaching government documents! Articles like these intrigue me. I know I’m eventually going back to school one of these days… maybe educational psychology will be the track I choose.
Anyway - here are my notes, a little more fleshed out than they were while I was reading.
Diana DeStefano and Jo-Anne LeFevre, Cognitive load in hypertext reading: A review, Computers in Human BehaviorVolume 23, Issue 3, , Including the Special Issue: Avoiding Simplicity, Confronting Complexity: Advances in Designing Powerful Electronic Learning Environments, May 2007, Pages 1616-1641. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6VDC-4H74M34-1/2/e37cd716e267888b1aa40400779d40f3)
Keywords: Hypertext; Working memory; Reading comprehension, Individual differences
When you’re following a bill through congress, using Lexis Nexis Congressional as your window, you end up following links to pages with more links with pages to even more links. Retaining any sort of notion of where you came from .. breadcrumbs back to the original document you were reading .. is difficult. You have to break your reading of one sequential document to follow links. Deep thinking is not as easy. Being constantly aware of how what you read on a page you arrived at following a link fits into what you were reading before you follow a link is taxing on memory. Mental load is overwhelmed, you drop some of the crumbs, forgetting how this fits into the grand scheme of things.
“Reading and navigating in hypertext are likely to place demands on working memory. Working memory is the set of mental resources that people use to encode, activate, store, and manipulate information while they perform cognitive tasks (Baddeley, 2003). Working memory theories provide a useful way of operationalizing the construct of cognitive load because a common assumption of working memory models is that a limited amount of information can be simultaneously processed (Baddeley and Logie, 1999, Miyake and Shah, 1999 and Sweller et al., 1990). This feature of working memory models corresponds well to the assumption that increases in mental load are associated with reduced performance in hypertext reading.”
On why it gets confusing:
Furthermore, every time a reader chooses to follow an embedded link, the text he or she encounters in node (n + 1) [the next page] potentially functions as an interruption of the ongoing comprehension process. Comprehension involves the development of situation models (described more fully in Section 2.3). Situation models are complex mental representations formed when readers integrate the statements in the text with their knowledge (Kintsch, 1988). To the extent that the text in node (n + 1) is related to and enhances the developing situation model, the interruption may have minimal effect on comprehension. To the extent that the text in a linked node is unrelated to the text in node (n) [the page of origin], disruption of the developing situation model may occur. Furthermore, because the reader will be faced with additional choices when he or she is processing the linked text, that is, to either return to node (n) or possibly to follow other embedded links, the disruption to developing comprehension may be severe.
Fairly straight forward. If the links go somewhere unrelated to what they were reading in the first place, it can be disorienting, and it will not help the reading understand how all of the texts they encounter fits together.
When following links in governmental documents, I feel disoriented. Disorientation experienced by students unused to the links available in congressional materials is explained:
This interference with the comprehension process may be a source of the disorientation that is a commonly reported problem in hypertext reading (Edwards and Hardman, 1989, Miall and Dobson, 2001 and Nielsen, 1990).
Here’s why undergrads are more succeptible:
A strong possibility is that hypertext is only beneficial for learning for some readers. According to the construction integration model, having prior knowledge helps because the reader can connect new information to a structure that already exists in long-term memory. Hence, hypertext readers with high prior knowledge may be better able to process fragments of text that are out of sequence because they can connect each fragment to existing knowledge whereas low-knowledge readers may have no existing structure to help them choose a reading sequence.
Lexis Nexis is hard to use for novice users. Sure, the interface could be part of the problem, but I really think it has to do with the massive amounts of links available. Experiences political scientists understand the way the government works. They appreciate all of the linking Lexis Nexis does to make related bills, votes, hearings and other documents immediately available via an embedded hyperlink. Novices, who may not know who these different documents are related, will only become confused if they follow an embedded link to a document they don’t know how to fit into their mental model of the text. Could we improve gov docs searching for novices by removing ‘related’ links? If the entry point was one specific bill, linking to hearings and votes directly related to that bill but not linking to ‘related’ parallel documents, it would be easier to manage?
These three studies suggest that low-knowledge students benefit from hypertext that transparently conveys the structure of the text content… Hierarchically structured hypertexts may have decreased extraneous cognitive load, producing benefits for the low-knowledge readers by illustrating text structure.
What might help links (hierarchical or not) from being interruptions in the learning / model making process is if they are labeled. Rolling over a link to a committee hearing could explain what a committee hearing is (”click here to read the transcripts of people who spoke about this bill in front of congress”).
The construction integration model can also be applied to conceptualize the role of links in reading. The model developed by van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) predicts that the presence of unlabeled links will not aid reading comprehension. A link does not serve to develop the situation model: a link tells merely that more information is available, but not how the linked text is related to other elements of the situation model. The underlined text may be made more salient, but salience alone does not strengthen the relations that are expressed in the situation model. In contrast, the model predicts that labeled links, indicating what type of information is available, might support development of the situation model because labels could alert the reader that the destination information should be incorporated into the current situation model, or that the link leads to a new topic and thus requires the formation of a new situation model.
All in all, a very interesting article. I’m not experienced enough in educational psychology to provide any real criticism, but these studies should inform our library resources when we think about their utility for new users. How can we design our systems to provide links that help students learn how information fits together? How can we avoid providing links that are more distracting than helpful? How do we build tools that are helpful to both new users, experienced users, and everyone in between?
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