The effectiveness of instructional design in hypertext environment through the Internet

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of two different text presentations, top-down and bottom-up, to improve learning performances and attitudes among undergraduate students enrolled in two educational psychology classes. In addition, the study was intended to examine whether the Internet could be used in university teaching to help students promote meaningful understanding and transfer their knowledge efficiently to enhance their learning. For this purpose, an internet program was developed according to the principles of Rhetorical Structure Theory and Mental Model Theory. This program presented the instructional materials of an educational psychology class in a structured way, focusing on the relationship between topic ideas and text structure of micro- and macro levels of text.; The experiment was carried out in the computer laboratory at a Midwestern university, during two hours on two separate days across a two-week period. During the two sessions of the experiment, 00half of the students read text with the Top-Down organization as the first task and text with the Bottom-Up organization as the second task. The other half of the students read the same texts with the opposite task order in a counterbalanced format.; The between-subjects factors were prior knowledge and task order. The within-subject factor was text organization. The major dependent measures were recall and comprehension test scores, as well as responses to surveys on students' attitudes toward the experimental treatment and learning the subject matter. Analysis of the test scores revealed that high prior knowledge students comprehended significantly better than low prior knowledge students when they read the Bottom-Up organization of text as the first task and the Top-Down organization as the second task. In contrast, students reading the Bottom-Up organization as the first task showed more favorable attitudes for learning subject matter than the students reading the Top-Down organization as the second task. However, the important result was the significant main effect, and interaction effect of text organization, prior knowledge, and task order on the comprehension measure.