Mental Representations Formed From Educational Website Formats

摘要

The increasing popularity of web-based distance education places high demand ondistance educators to format web pages to facilitate learning. However, limited guidelinesexist regarding appropriate writing styles for web-based distance education. This studyinvestigated the effect of four different writing styles on reader’s mental representation ofhypertext. Participants studied hypertext written in one of four web-writing styles (e.g.,concise, scannable, objective, and combined) and were then administered a cuedassociation task intended to measure their mental representations of the hypertext. It ishypothesized that the scannable and combined styles will bias readers to scan rather thanelaborately read, which may result in less dense mental representations (as identifiedthrough Pathfinder analysis) relative to the objective and concise writing styles. Further,the use of more descriptors in the objective writing style will lead to better integration ofideas and more dense mental representations than the concise writing style.