The Effect of Enhanced Navigational Affordances on College Students' Comprehension of Informational Auditory Text, and the Role of Metacognitive and Motivational Factors

A proliferation of natural speech audio texts as well as improvements in synthetic text-to-speech technology have created new opportunities for learners. While many studies have examined factors affecting comprehension of print texts, few have examined factors affecting comprehension of audio texts and fewer still the effects of specific moderating variables. This study examines the effects of navigational affordance use on comprehension of informational audio texts. Factors of metacomprehension, including self-regulation and rehearsal, as well as motivational factors of interest, effort regulation, and test anxiety were studied for their relationship to the use of navigational affordances. The study utilized a mobile application distributed through the iTunes® store to administer the experimental procedure. Students enrolled in an introductory political science course at a large state university were solicited to participate. Participants were randomly assigned to either the experimental or control group. The experimental group (N = 74) had access to enhanced navigational affordances including pause and continue, forward by sentence, forward by paragraph, backward by sentence, and backward by paragraph. The control group (N = 11) only had access to pause and continue affordances. Results indicate that the presence of enhanced navigational affordances did not demonstrate a significant difference in comprehension between the experimental and control groups. However, there was a significant correlation between navigational affordance use and comprehension. The data indicate the relationship may be curvilinear meaning that affordance use is more frequent for learners with average comprehension, and less frequent for high and low comprehension learners. Metacomprehension and motivational factors were not significantly correlated with navigational affordance use. Motivational factors did positively correlate with comprehension for both groups with an F = 5.49 and α = 0.002. Beta weights for the three factors were 0.29 for interest, -0.35 for test anxiety, and 0.003 for motivation. Information on distractions during the study were also collected. Some participants demonstrated a pattern of skipping behavior when using navigational affordances in which they would quickly navigate through the audio text. The study platform could be used to administer other kinds of audio text comprehension experiments