The Effects of Hypertext Structure, Presentation, and Instruction Types on Perceived Disorientation and Recall Performances

Navigation in web-based environments is one of the challenging tasks for hypertext readers. During reading, hypertext readers are reported to allocate their cognitive resources to meet the cognitive demands and are often reported to get disoriented while navigating through hyperlinks. Meanwhile, readers’ understanding of hypertext structures and memories interact while navigating between pages. Yet, as researchers pointed out and the correlations are taken into account, there are no research studies that have directly explored their factorial patterns within the context of hypertext reading process. Therefore, the purpose of this study is both to investigate the confirmatory study of a Perceived Disorientation Scale (PDS), and to investigate the effects of hypertext structure, presentation type, and instruction type on readers’ implicit and explicit memory performances and their perceived disorientation. Instruction type and presentation type main effects were found to be significant only on WSC scores (memory scores). However, there was no significant main effect of hypertext structure observed for neither WSC nor PDS-TR scores. The interaction effect between hypertext structure and presentation type was significant only on PDS-TR scores, yet no other interaction effects were significant. Potential implications of these results for e-learning providers and content developers in hypertext are discussed, followed with further research questions.