Making Sense of Texts: a Meta-Analysis of College Students and Adults' Reading Strategies in a Hypermedia Environment

With the information influx from the hypermedia environment, queries have been made on the reading landscape, markedly related to college and adult readers, as they are perceived to have limited experience with the hypermedia environment. This environment calls on new literacies for a reader to cope with reading tasks inherent to its features. In this context, new challenges have been posed regarding online reading strategies of college and adult readers. With the dearth of literature about how college and adult readers navigate their way in their reading tasks in the hypermedia environment, this paper described their strategies in reading. The information gathered from the studies conducted before can contribute to the present plight of our readers who need to navigate their way through reading in a hypermedia environment. Eight studies that met the criteria on the variables of the study were included. The studies revealed the following reading strategies of college and adult readers: global, problem-solving, local, cognitive and metacognitive, and navigation strategies. This evidenced that print-based reading strategies are basics on which reading strategies in the hypermedia environment are built for strategic readers to be successful in their online reading tasks