The influence of navigation map scope on disorientation of elementary students in learning a web-based hypermedia course

The goal of this study is to determine the optimal scope for the navigation map in hypermedia courseware. The influence of the scope of the navigation map on disorientation was compared. One hundred and forty-six fifth-grade elementary students from four intact classes participated in this study. A multileveled design was adopted. The independent variable was the scope of navigation map, and the dependent variable was the degree of disorientation measured by the number of browsed pages, number of searching steps, and score of disorientation. The results show that the navigation map scope did impact pupils' performance in terms of searching steps. In particular, a larger field is better, although the field does not necessarily have to be global.