The present study examined children's digital text comprehension of digital text types linear digital text vs hypertext, with or without graphical navigable overviews. We investigated to what extent individual variation in children's comprehension could be explained by lexical quality (word reading efficiency and vocabulary knowledge), cognitive load factors (prior knowledge and working memory), text type and graphical overview. Participants were 93 sixth graders in a within-subject design. Word reading efficiency, vocabulary knowledge and prior knowledge predicted children's digital comprehension scores, while working memory did not. Reading comprehension was equal for linear text or hypertext. However, the presence of an overview facilitated reading comprehension for readers with lower prior knowledge. It can be concluded that hypertexts with basic digital text features and accompanying comprehension questions are not more difficult for children than linear digital texts, that similar individual factors predict reading comprehension of linear text and hypertext, and that a graphical overview helps when prior knowledge is low.

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Children in primary school read hypertext for comprehension. However, children typically are taught reading strategies for linear text, while these strategies are not automatically transferrable one-to-one to hypertext. In the present study, a training group of 55 sixth-graders were taught four hypertext reading strategies (planning, monitoring, evaluation and elaboration) via mind mapping and the usage of a prompting paper-card. A control group of 29 children received no strategy training. We examined to what extent strategy training influenced children’s strategy use and learning outcomes: (1) number of pages read and reading time per text, (2) literal / inferential reading comprehension scores and (3) knowledge representations (relatedness judgment task and mind maps). At posttest, the training group showed higher scores on a self-reported strategy usage questionnaire, and higher comprehension scores as compared to the control group. Hypertext strategy training in combination with mind-mapping supports children’s hypertext comprehension.