Supporting Understanding through Task and Browser Design

While electronic text offers the potential to explain, illustrate, and scaffold understanding in powerful new ways, few studies on educational use of electronic text resources have shown significant learning gains, or even measured learning outcomes in controlled experiments (Chen & Rada, 1996; Dillon & Gabbard, 1998). In a follow-up to previous studies (Wiley & Voss, 1999), the present experiments study the effects of different tasks and browser designs on navigation and reading patterns, as well as on memory and comprehension measures from electronic text. These studies have revealed that only when both the task and the design support integration (such as in a two-windowed browser) and students are explicitly directed how to use the feature, do students take advantage of the flexibility of the multiple-source environment, integrate across sources, and achieve the best level of understanding.