Designing metacognitive support for learning from hypertext: what factors come into play

Traditional expository texts typically follow formats that have been well established and predictable. However, design of hypertext systems depend to a large extent on the epistemological, instructional and design perspectives that the design team espouses. Therefore, one of the important differences in learning from hypertext compared to learning from traditional text is that students need to understand the structure of the information space, i.e. they need to understand how the different semantic units are related to each other so that they can make better navigational decisions. In this paper we discuss results from a classroom study using CoMPASS, a hypertext system. Our results suggest that students who understood the structure of the system did better on measures of navigation and learning. Self-monitoring in a hypertext environment was seen to be contingent upon the learner’s understanding of the structure well enough to be able to choose appropriate semantic units. .