Research for Practitioners: Does Information Structure Affect Learning?

Is it better to present large amounts of information thesame way to all learners, or should the presentation depend on the reader’slevel of knowledge about the topic? The results of a study offer importantinsights about this question for eLearning design.

The study

“Influence of Text Structure and Prior Knowledge of theLearner on Reading Comprehension, Browsing, and Perceived Control.” Calisir, F.and Z. Gurel. Computers in HumanBehavior, 19. 2003. (Editor’s Note:Unfortunately, the full text of this article is not readily available online,although at least one site will provide it for a fee.)

Thequestion

How do learners at different levels of expertise engage withdifferently structured material? Specifically, should we give learners information in a long lineardocument (e.g., a single-page article) or in a hierarchical format, where theycan see the structure and choose links to different parts of the document?Also, is this different for novice learners vs. learners who already haveknowledge of the subject?

The method

Participants in this study read a piece of text around 5,000words long. Of the 30 participants, half were knowledgeable about the subject,having taken a course on it, and half were not. Participants accessed the texton a computer in one of three randomly assigned conditions:

1. The first group read the text as a lineardocument, like the kind you might produce in Word.
2. The second group were given the text as a hierarchically-structuredhypertext document: Imagine the Wikipedia page for your favorite TV show, whichhas several “child” pages, one for each series of the show; each series page inturn has a number of “child” pages, one per episode, etc. In this study, thehierarchical structure went six layers deep.
3. The last group read the text as a “mixed” hypertextdocument, similar to the hierarchical group, but with several additional “network-style”links between pages—in the Wikipedia example, extra links like this mightconnect two episodes starring the same guest actor or connect a series page andan episode page whose titles share a common theme.

So in other words, while the text was the same in all threeconditions, participants were able to navigate it in three very different ways.

All participants were given 40 minutes to read the text,during which time the computer tracked the links clicked by those in the hierarchicaland mixed groups. A short test was then used to measure participants’ readingcomprehension.

The results

First, the unsurprising results: Participants who wereknowledgeable about the material performed significantly better in the readingcomprehension test than their less knowledgeable peers. This in itself isn’ttoo surprising, since when you already know something about a topic, it’s much easierto understand and retain new information about it.

Furthermore, there was no significant difference between thetest scores of knowledgeable and non-knowledgeable participants across thehierarchical and mixed conditions—this makes sense when you consider that theinformation in both conditions was hyperlinked with a dominant hierarchicalstructure, and that participants in both groups clicked about the same numberof links while reading.

The really interesting finding was that participants’ levelof knowledge about the topic interacted significantly with the differentlearning conditions to affect how well they scored in the test. Crucially, linearly-presentedinformation appeared to be least suitable for non-knowledgeable participantsand most suitable for those who were knowledgeable about the subject. SeeFigure 1.

Figure 1: Average reading comprehension scores for knowledgeableand non-knowledgeable participants in the linear, hierarchical, and mixedpresentation groups

Implicationsfor eLearning design

1. Considerthat long linear documents may be better suited to expert learners. Asexperts, these learners may already have internalized many of the material’simplicit structural hierarchies—reiterating such structural information might beunnecessarily repetitive, and could result in something like the “expertisereversal effect” (Kalyuga et al).
2. Helpnon-expert learners compensate for their lack of mental models of the domain byproviding structural information, such as hierarchical relations. Note thata strictly “network-like” hyperlinked environment can disorient beginners (seeMohageg), so it’s a good idea to preserve some recognizable hierarchy.

Additionalreferences:

Kalyuga,S., P. Ayres, P. Chandler, and J. Sweller. “The Expertise Reversal Effect.” Educational Psychologist, 38 (1). 2003. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-007-9054-3

Mohageg,M. F. “The Influence of Hypertext Linking Structures on the Efficiency ofInformation Retrieval.” Human Factors, 34.1992. https://hfs.sagepub.com/content/34/3/351.short