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Gender and information processing in electronic age

Published: 22 September 2008 Publication History

Abstract

The effect of gender in academic achievement has often been the focus of research because of its potential implications. However, the Web has modified the way people access and use information. The present study examines the differences between males' and females' reading behaviour in hypertexts. The study focuses on text based electronic documents. Ninety participants (27 females and 63 males) read a hierarchically structured hypertext and answered a set of questions. The study examines some original variables not previously studied comprehensively, such as coherence of transactions, sum of selected hyperlinks, hyperlink location etc. The results show that gender did not significantly affect any of the measured variables. The data consisted of reading times, comprehension scores, coherent links, hyperlink location, sum of hyperlinks, and the sum of read nodes.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGDOC '08: Proceedings of the 26th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication
September 2008
303 pages
ISBN:9781605580838
DOI:10.1145/1456536
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 22 September 2008

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Author Tags

  1. cognitive processes
  2. coherence
  3. comprehension
  4. gender
  5. hyperlinks
  6. hypertext
  7. information processing
  8. reading

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