How Students Use Contextual Cues in Finding Information in Paper and Electronic Textbooks

Using contextual cues to find or review information is a useful and natural skill. Reading of traditional books provides contextual cues to aid in memory recall and finding of information. On the contrary e-books do not support the generation of contextual cues so well. In an e-book, a reader finds information mostly from full-text searching and by using the scrollbar. However a trade-off between precision and recall may occur during the search, and scrollbars provide only a rough idea of approximate location in a document. Many studies have added cues to scrollbars (information spaces), but fewer studies have investigated what contextual cues are used by readers to find information and the behavior adopted in finding information by using contextual cues. According to our observations, names of chapters and subchapters are important contextual cues in finding information, because the reader can easily grasp their location within a document. However more tangible information space with more useful contextual cues within that space is necessary so that readers can grasp the structure of content.