Abstract:

Digital education is a multifaceted phenomenon of our time and it can be defined as a process of organizing the interaction between learners and students in a digital educational environment. Despite great shifts in modern educational institutions, reading function continues to be the key way, or tool, for acquiring knowledge in a digital world. The rapid transition from predominantly book, newspaper and magazine reading to reading from the screens of digital devices is accomplished with changes in the structure of reading. Especially, the functional reading, as a specific type of reading, which is aimed at finding information (Nielsen et al., 2010). The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of the navigation and dynamic characteristics of the presentation of text on digital devices on the process of information search. The hypothesis was that the effectiveness of navigation in the text depends on the degree of enrichment of the digital environment with navigation tips. Four types of text presentation formats were arranged. “Longread” and “Page” formed two groups according to the way of dynamic interaction with the text. The Page-group provided an opportunity to read in a fixed text editor viewer. There was a division into subgroups based on the presence or absence of the ability to review the entire text, implemented through the option of the text editor «Miniature» («+ mini»).

The stimulus material consisted of four texts, normalized for readability and legibility, or for content and complexity, and visual characteristics, respectively. A two-step selection of texts provided a readability standardization. The primary selection of texts was carried out through the extended meta-text mark-up of the National Corps of the Russian Language. Further, the texts were automatically evaluated according to the most popular metrics of complexity.

15 healthy people (average 32 years old, with normal or corrected vision) took part in this experiment. They read four texts, one in each format and then they were asked to find and highlight answers to six questions in the text. The time spent searching for answers and the complexity of the eye movements scan-paths were calculated. The eye-tracking method was used to explore the reading process. Eye movements were recorded with SMI RED 120 (frequency 120 Hz; the accuracy <0.1 angular degrees). The two-way ANOVA results showed that the type of format does not significantly affect the time for searching for answers in the text (F = 1.84, p> 0.05). This means that none of four mediums provided any noticeable advantages in the speed of finding the answer. However, a statistically significant effect of the type of medium on the complexity of the scan-path during the search was found (F = 5.35, p <0.05). Specifically, in the «Longread+mini» format, the shortest gaze-path was observed. In the «Pages» case all the subjects performed the most complex gaze-paths. And the «Pages + mini» and «Longread» formats demonstrated intermediate length of the trajectories. The results obtained in this study can be interpreted as the fact that enriched with navigation tips format, which allow to review the text as a whole and smooth dynamic interaction contribute to purposeful navigation through the text when searching for information. The analysis of the scan-paths made it possible to quantify the differences in a person’s navigational behaviour while reading texts presented in various formats.

Keywords:

Text navigation, eye-tracking, digital education.