Exploring the distribution of online healthcare information
CHI '03 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Visualization of web spaces: state of the art and future directions
ACM SIGMIS Database
Effects of the metacognitive computer-tool met.a.ware on the web search of laypersons
Computers in Human Behavior
Promoting active learning: the role of system structure in learning from hypertext
Human-Computer Interaction
Do graphical overviews facilitate or hinder comprehension in hypertext?
Computers & Education
Reading skills and children's navigation strategies in hypertext
Computers in Human Behavior
Web page previews: effect on comprehension, user perceptions, and site exploration
Journal of Information Science
Multimedia Tools and Applications
Searching the Web for conflicting topics: Page and user factors
Computers in Human Behavior
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A key task for students learning about a complex topic from multiple documents on the web is to establish the existing rhetorical relations between the documents. Traditional search engines such as Google(R) display the search results in a listed format, without signalling any relationship between the documents retrieved. New search engines such as Kartoo(R) go a step further, displaying the results as a constellation of documents, in which the existing relations between pages are made explicit. This presentation format is based on previous studies of single-text comprehension, which demonstrate that providing a graphical overview of the text contents and their relation boosts readers' comprehension of the topic. We investigated the assumption that graphical overviews can also facilitate multiple-documents comprehension. The present study revealed that undergraduate students reading a set of web pages on climate change comprehended them better when using a search engine that makes explicit the relationships between documents (i.e. Kartoo-like) than when working with a list-like presentation of the same documents (i.e. Google-like). The facilitative effect of a graphical-overview interface was reflected in inter-textual inferential tasks, which required students to integrate key information between documents, even after controlling for readers' topic interest and background knowledge.