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One of the fundamental principles of content literacy instruction is that supporting learning from text should involve a focus both on the content to be learned and on the processes students apply as they work to acquire, organize, and integrate that content (Readence, Bean, & Baldwin, 1995, pp. 9-10). The significance of this fundamental principle in terms of instructional outcomes is clearly related to the accessibility and complexity of the material to be learned, since more complex or less accessible text will require more sophisticated learning processes on the part of students. Unfortunately, the World Wide Web, although routinely touted as a breakthrough technology for educators, poses special difficulties with respect to the process focus advocated by content literacy experts (see, e.g., Anderson & Joerg, 1996; Edwards & Hardman, 1989; Nielsen, 1989). Fortunately, new dynamic capabilities of on-line reading environments and the tools they support should help software designers and educators to develop learning materials that can help readers avoid some of the problems with web-based content that have been documented in the literature.

One such new web technology involves the concept of a learner's “path,” a term that refers to a specific navigational sequence within a hypertext document. The concept of a path has significance for research in hypertext reading from two rather different perspectives. The descriptive perspective uses path data as a basis for empirical investigations of user movement in hypertext (Cardle, 1994; McEneaney, 1999, online document; Smith, 1996). But the concept of path also has a prescriptive interpretation that is more immediately relevant to thinking about hypertext as a learning tool. Cognitive flexibility theory (Jacobson & Spiro, 1995; Spiro & Jehng, 1990), for instance, suggests that learning about a complex, ill-structured domain requires numerous carefully designed traversals (i.e., paths) across the terrain that defines that domain, and that different traversals yield different insights and understandings. Flexibility is thought to arise from the appreciation learners acquire for variability within the domain and their capacity to use this understanding to reconceptualize knowledge.

The important idea behind a path is that, in the absence of design, the navigation of an inexperienced reader may more closely resemble a random walk than a traversal likely to promote insight. Simply dropping students into complex hypertext may do little more than confuse and frustrate them. To the extent that we impose paths, however, we also limit the ways our students can learn from and explore the materials we want them to read. The critical issue is whether the support we impose helps or hinders learning.