The Role of Student Tasks in Accessing Cognitive Media Types

We believe that identifying media by their cognitive roles (e.g., definition, explanation, pseudo-code, visualization) can improve comprehension and usability in hypermedia systems designed for learning. We refer to media links organized around their cognitive role as cognitive media types [Recker, Ram, Shikano, Li, & Stasko, 1995] . Our hypothesis is that the goals that students bring to the learning task will affect how they will use the hypermedia support system [Ram & Leake, 1995] . We explored student use of a hypermedia system based on cognitive media types where students performed different orienting tasks: undirected, browsing in order to answer specific questions, problem-solving, and problem-solving with prompted self-explanations. We found significant differences in use behavior between problem-solving and browsing students, though no learning differences.