Adolescents' Understanding of Electronic Educational Hypertext (in Comparison with Printed Hypertext)

<p>The article presents the results of a study comparing reading and understanding of two identical versions of educational hypertext – electronic and printed. The relevance of the work is determined by the important role of hypertext structures in the system of modern digital technologies, the need to teach schoolchildren effective strategies for navigation, search and analysis of hypertext information. The study involved 108 students in grades 7-8 of secondary schools in Moscow and the Moscow region. A specially designed educational hypertext of humanitarian content was used as a stimulus material. A comparative analysis of electronic and printed hypertext was carried out according to the following parameters: understanding of the general content of the text, understanding of conceptual and factual information. It was found that students who worked with electronic hypertext coped with the diagnostic test in general and with understanding factual information in particular significantly better (p <0.05) than those who worked with the paper version. Conceptual information understanding was also more successful when reading from the screen, although the differences were insignificant (p>0.05). However, regardless of the reading format, most students demonstrated superficial comprehension: only 9.7% of them were able to fully correctly understand and formulate the main idea of ​​the text, and about half (50.5%) failed to complete the task. The data obtained allow us to conclude that, although working with hypertext is more successful in a digital environment, the prevalence of incomplete and inaccurate understanding indicates the need for special regular work in schools to teach students effective strategies for interacting with hypertext both from screens and from paper.</p>