Adolescents’ comprehension of the main idea during the reading process of electronic educational hypertext

The relevance of the article is due to the widespread practice of reading electronic texts, namely hypertexts, not only in everyday life, but also in education. The key issue is text comprehension, one of the major concerns today. The study aims to conduct a pilot experiment designed to determine the level of understanding the main idea of an educational humanities hypertext by school students in years 7–8 (n = 46). The research employed theoretical literature analysis, individualized formative assessment, and the author’s diagnostic methodology for assessing text comprehension. It is found that more than half of the participants (60.8 %) completed the assignment at a very low or low level, and only 17.3 % did it at a relatively high or high level. The results indicate a deficiency in the adolescents’ ability to identify conceptual information in the text in relation to an educational hypertext. Moreover, the participants demonstrated a partial or complete lack of understanding the text they had read. The content analysis of the students’ responses enabled me to identify the typical difficulties the participants faced. These include replacement of the main idea with the topic of the text, finding factual information instead of conceptual information, different types of retelling, lack of generalisation, and others. The analysis of literature and the students’ completed assignments make it possible to believe that these difficulties are characteristic of reading text not only on screens, but also on paper. Thus, they do not depend on the information-carrying medium. Consequently, teaching digital reading should begin with developing students’ ability to find the main idea in the text in the process of reading primarily traditional printed texts. Knowing textual difficulties and understanding the reasons for errors in identifying the main idea will help the teacher to competently organise work with different types of texts.