ang-Yi Li

Construction of cognitive maps to improve e-book reading and navigation

People have greater difficulty reading academic textbooks on screen than on paper. One notable problem is that they cannot construct an effective cognitive map because of the lack of contextual information cues and ineffective navigational mechanisms in e-books. To support the construction of cognitive maps, this paper proposes the visual cue map, which presents pages and within-page spatial cues in an interactive toolbar, and reflects the physical structure of the book and the relative relationship between cues and pages. An e-book reading system integrated with the visual cue map and 2 reading strategies-surveying and questioning-was developed, and an experiment was conducted to examine the effect of the visual cue map on the reading, reviewing, and navigational performance of readers. The results showed that participants who used the system with the visual cue map spent significantly less time to complete 10 navigational tasks and gained a higher reviewing score. Based on the results, we conclude that the visual cue map can improve navigational performance, which also improves reviewing performance. The improvements may be due to the visual cue map helping the construction of cognitive maps.

How Students Use Contextual Cues in Finding Information in Paper and Electronic Textbooks

Using contextual cues to find or review information is a useful and natural skill. Reading of traditional books provides contextual cues to aid in memory recall and finding of information. On the contrary e-books do not support the generation of contextual cues so well. In an e-book, a reader finds information mostly from full-text searching and by using the scrollbar. However a trade-off between precision and recall may occur during the search, and scrollbars provide only a rough idea of approximate location in a document. Many studies have added cues to scrollbars (information spaces), but fewer studies have investigated what contextual cues are used by readers to find information and the behavior adopted in finding information by using contextual cues. According to our observations, names of chapters and subchapters are important contextual cues in finding information, because the reader can easily grasp their location within a document. However more tangible information space with more useful contextual cues within that space is necessary so that readers can grasp the structure of content.

Accessing online learning material: Quantitative behavior patterns and their effects on motivation and learning performance

Abstract Accessing learning materials, that is, lecture slides, video lectures, shared assignments, and forum messages, is the most frequently performed online learning activity. However, students with different purposes, motivations, and preferences may exhibit different behaviors when accessing these materials. These different behaviors may further affect their learning performance. This study analyzed system logs recorded by a Learning Management System in which 59 computer science students participated in a blended learning course to learn mobile phone programming. The results revealed several significant findings. First, the students viewed the learning materials related to their classroom lectures (i.e., lecture slides and video lectures) for longer and more often than other learning materials (i.e., shared assignments and posted messages). Second, although the students spent a great deal of time viewing the online learning materials, most did not use annotation tools. Third, students’ viewing behaviors showed great variety and were clustered into three behavior patterns: “consistent use students” who intensively used all of the learning materials, “slide intensive use students” who intensively used the lecture slides, and “less use students” who infrequently used any learning material. These different behavior patterns were also associated with their motivation and learning performance. The results are discussed, and several suggestions for teachers, researchers, and system designers are proposed.

Effect of hypertext highlighting on browsing, reading, and navigational performance

Reading hypertext documents is more difficult than reading traditional linear text. Text highlighting plays the role of encoding for reading comprehension and may play the roles of contextual cues and landmarks for hypertext navigation. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of text highlight and organizing highlighted text into a hierarchical structure on browsing, reading, and navigation performance in a network hypertext system. A randomized experiment was conducted. Ninety participants were randomly assigned to three conditions: a reading system with text highlighting, with text highlighting and organizing highlighted text, and without any aids. Dependent variables included browsing performance: time spent and the length of navigational path for reading; reading performance: recall and inference scores, navigational performance: scores of landmark and route knowledge and time spent and the length of navigational path for completing nine navigational tasks. The results showed that text highlight did not improve reading and navigational performance. By contrast, organizing highlighted text yielded significantly worst performance in reading and navigation. According to the results, we propose several suggestions for the design of reading instruction and digital highlighters. Text highlighting may play the roles of contextual cues for navigation.An experiment examined the effect of text highlight and organizing highlighted text.Text highlighting did not improve reading and navigation performance.Organizing highlighted text yielded the significantly lowest performance.

The Effect of Utilizing the Learning Skill of Highlighting and Constructing a Map in a Networked Hyperlink Condition on Learning Performance

Annotation is a frequently used learning skill. When taking note, the reader only focuses on partial content of a topic or a segment. The note would be non-organized and piecemeal. Therefore, the relationship between topic and annotation would be lost or indirect including the relationship among annotations. Thus, because of the dispersion of annotations, readers would lose the structure of the content that they marked and wrote. In order to integrate the drawback of dispersion of annotation, we designed a system for taking and reorganizing annotation based on the readers knowledge structure. Therefore, all annotation would be integrated to keep the integrity of it. Thus in this study, we design a system with the function of highlighting and building a map to investigate whether the system enhances the learning performance of reader in a networked structure hyperlink condition.