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The Impact of Presentation Format, Task Assignment, and Prior Knowledge on Students' Comprehension of Multiple Online Documents

This study investigated the impact of prior knowledge, writing task, and hypertext format on university students' comprehension of multisource hypertext. Fifty-two students categorized as having high or low prior knowledge studied hypertext consisting of seven component texts on the topic of social influence. Some students were given a summary writing task; others were asked to write arguments regarding the topic. Also, some students experienced the component texts organized by topic, and others experienced them introduced by source (i.e., author and date). Dependent measures included reading time and scores on a comprehension post-test as well as number and nature of connectives and number and nature of idea units included in students' essays. High knowledge students spent less time than low knowledge students and also did better on the comprehension post-test. Moreover, the argument task led to more causal connectives and more transformed information in students' papers, whereas the summary task resulted in more temporal connectives and paraphrases. Third, presentation of the material by source resulted in better macrostructural comprehension on the post-test, whereas the topic format resulted in better microstructural comprehension. Findings are discussed in terms of development of hypertext materials and task construction, and suggestions are made for further studies.