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Investigating the Effect of Individual Thinking Styles on the Use of Navigational Aids in a Hypertext System.

Many people subscribe to the folk theory that geniuses somehow think differently to everyone else, and herein lies the key to their genius; they are not confined to the ways of thinking which inhibit the rest of us. The anecdotal evidence of their poor performance in school does suggest, however, that the way they think also inhibits them, to a certain extent.

How much are all of us affected in our ability to learn by the style in which we think? Since the 1970's many theories of thinking (or cognitive) style have been put forward. Styles are notable in that they are very distinct from abilities, such as IQ, because there should never be a style which is maladaptive all the time. For instance, it is usually considered to be more adaptive to have a high IQ, and there are no circumstances under which it would be maladaptive. However, if you are a person who likes remembering facts, this will be an adaptive trait in a multiple choice exam, but not a creative writing one (Sternberg, 1997).

Sternberg (1997) puts forward a theory of Mental Self-Government, in which he compares a person’s thinking style to the way a government is run; the benefits and costs of a particular style of government are not absolute, but depend entirely on the situation. According to this theory, there are five aspects to thinking style; like government, it has functions (legislative, executive, judicial), forms (monarchic, hierarchic, oligarchic, anarchic), levels (global, local), scope (internal, external) and leanings (liberal, conservative). A person can have any combination of these traits, and the combination of these traits will determine how the person prefers to work. For instance, if a person prefers to operate on the global level, they would be much more comfortable learning concepts than individual out-of-context facts. In contrast, a local thinker would prefer to deal with details than vague wider issues. Sternberg argues that this preference can have a huge impact on your happiness; “When your profile of thinking styles is a good match to an environment, you thrive. When it is a bad match, you suffer.” (p. x, Sternberg, 1997)

While psychologists were working on theories of learning style, computer-aided learning specialists were working on hypertext and hypermedia. Hypertext was a term coined by Nelson in 1967 expressing his vision of text linked so that it is possible to travel from section to section in a non-linear manner. This is opposed to traditional linear text, such as that found in a book, where you start at the beginning and continue until you reach the end. Examples of these different styles of text, as used in this study, can be found in the Method section. The concept of hypertext owes a lot to Bush's idea of the Memex "a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanised so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility" (Bush, quoted by Keep &Laughlin, 1995). Key to these early ideas were the ability for information to be "chunked" into "nodes". "Links" could be created between these nodes, to allow the user to move between them, whilst using a consistent interface (Conklin, 1987, in McAleese, 1989). Since then, the technology has become available to make this a reality, and also to link the text to pictures, sound and video, termed hypermedia.

For a long time, the only hypertext or hypermedia systems in existence were relatively small systems designed using packages such as HyperCard, to assist specific courses or publications, or purely for research purposes. These systems subscribed closely to the dreams of Nelson and Bush that the user could create his or her links, so that the structure would be created by them. From a Constructivist viewpoint, this would aid learning more than passively observing the text. (Cunningham, Duffy and Knuth, 1993). These systems are, however, no longer those which are most widely used. Technology has advanced and hypermedia systems are now big business, with a wide range of CD-ROM publications now available, including the most common, Encarta, an encyclopaedia, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica soon to be available on CD. Encyclopaedias are a good example of a hypertext system, even in paper form, as they are designed to be read in a non-linear manner; each entry has references to other entries, perhaps denoted by the word appearing in italics. You read the entry you were originally interested in, then look up the other related items that interest you. In the language of hypertext, you are following links to other information nodes. This is an activity known as "browsing", distinct from "navigation" in which you use some kind of guide to help you find what you are looking for (McAleese, 1989).

However, hypermedia had still further potential than this. "Bodies of unnetworked hypertext were inherently hobbled...they were like office buildings outfitted with intercoms, when what they really needed were telephones to connect to the bigger and more important outside world."(Reid 1997) When Nelson envisioned hypertext, he saw Xanadu, a system comprising ""everything" written about the subject, or vaguely relevant to it, tied together by editors (and NOT by "programmers," dammit), in which you may read in all the directions you wish to pursue. There can be alternate pathways for people who think different ways." (Nelson, quoted in Keep & Laughlin, 1995) Although in the words of Wired's Gary Wolf, Xanadu was "a 30 year saga of rabid prototyping and heart-slashing despair,” (p. 173, Reid, 1997) it was still a dream to which many aspired. For around twenty years, university engineering departments in the US have been communicating information through an interconnection of networks known as the Internet, but it wasn't until 1991 that this information became a hypertext system and the World Wide Web (WWW) was born. In late 1993, Mosaic, the first graphical browser went into circulation. Users all over the world "downloaded Mosaic and there it was - Xanadu!" (p. 175 ibid.).

The WWW is a hypermedia-based system, which is growing all the time, as anyone can add their own parts to it. Browsing in this system can be very dangerous, because of the sheer amount of information available. The opening quote lyrically expresses the vertiginous feeling many people get when encountering it for the first time; it invokes fear, excitement or both with its sheer size. When you are free to search, you can wander from page to fascinating page, away from the topic you originally set out to investigate, a phenomenon known as "getting lost" (Hammond, 1993). For this reason, a variety of aids have been developed to help users to navigate the information. It was the inclusion of some of these which helped to make Mosaic so much more popular than it's predecessor. The two most common web browsers (Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator) incorporate a history file and a bookmark list to aid navigation. The history file lists recently visited sites, so that you can go back and forth to any point within a session, and if you find yourself becoming lost you can return to a point before this happened. If you find a page especially useful or interesting, you can bookmark it, and return to it at any time in the future.

Most hypermedia publications and professional websites have navigational aids, such as site maps or guided tours, to complement the navigational aids provided by the user's Web browser, with the intention of making the sites easier to use and the user more likely to buy the product. Most of these are currently designed along principles of marketing or through opinion formed from what the designer finds helpful, as "Despite a century of work on the psychology of reading there is no theory of the reader that designers can use to develop a usable hypertext document from first principles," (p. 5, McKnight et al. 1993).

Since your thinking style influences the way you interact with any kind of learning material, there is reason to believe that it affects the way you interact with hypertext material. Above, Nelson indicated how he believed there could be pathways for people who think in different ways. Lumb (1997) investigated whether different kinds of navigational aid could help people with different thinking styles to learn material. She found that this was not the case, but since Sternberg suggests that people are more flexible in thinking style than we might expect, and that thinking style is not related to ability, this may have been the wrong question to ask regarding thinking style and navigational aids. Since a thinking style is a preference, then if it affects the use of navigational aids, it will be in the kind of navigational aid a person prefers to use. Pask and Scott (cited in Allinson, 1992) suggested that people employ holist or serialist strategies when learning, preferring to get an overview or to work through text from the beginning. We were interested in whether this relates to the global and local levels of Mental Self-Government.

In this experiment, Lumb's general design has been adapted to investigate this idea. In a similar experiment, Allinson (1992), using Entwistle’s theory of learning strategies, discovered that students with a reproducing orientation preferred to use a tour and those with a meaning orientation preferred using indexes. Entwistle’s theory is similar to a theory by Gibbs (1994), who suggested that people who were motivated by interest in material would employ a different learning strategy to those who were motivated to pass tests. Yet another theory is put forward by Brown and Atkins (1994, cited by Kelly, 1995), who divided learners into knowledge seekers and understanding seekers. These are all theories of learning strategy. The strategy is the mode of learning you employ with a specific task, and is influenced both by your learning style and your approach to the task in hand. Since the task we used was compulsory, it was suspected all participants might have a similar strategy - to get it over with - so it was thought to be more useful to look at learning style. Students using a hypertext system were assessed to discover their level of mental self-government, that is, whether they think globally or locally. When they entered the hypertext system, they were given a choice between reading material in a linear manner, or using a concept map to guide their browsing. The hypotheses were that global thinkers would prefer to use the concept map, as it gives an overview, and that local thinkers would prefer to use the linear format. Versatile thinkers, who lie towards the middle of the continuum, would exhibit no preference.
 
 

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Abstract
Method
Results
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