Using Hypertext to Teach K-12 Students

In the two experiments made by Foltz(1993), it showed that there was no significant performance differences between the readers of the hypertext and the linear text. On the whole, the subjects used equivalent reading strategies and coherent manner for different types of texts, so they achieved similar comprehension. Even if their assigned goal was to find specific information, the subjects with little background knowledge tended to acquire necessary background context first in a coherent manner instead of jumping to the specific knowledge directly.

However, if hypertext is applied to the learning of k-12 students, I think the result will be quite different. The subjects in these experiments are undergraduate students who are capable of reading texts in a coherent and organized way. But according to my teaching experience, k-12 students still have to develop their logic and reading skills through education. Therefore, if they are not familiar with the topic, they get confused and lost easily when using hypertext as learning materials. Unlike undergraduate students, if k-12 students are asked to search for specific information, they will probably look for evident labels and use jumps to go down to it instead of understanding the whole text coherently. Although it seems that they can find the relevant information efficiently, they may not really grasp at the big picture of the text. As a result, in this case, teachers play important roles in designing accurate guided questions to lead students to read the hypertext coherently and logically. Moreover, it is critical to select the well-structured hypertext as teaching materials, which makes k-12 students easy to follow. So it is a bigger challenge for teachers to apply hypertext to teach k-12 students.