Successful learning from hypertext requires a set of cognitive and metacognitive strategies. Despite of already knowing many of these strategies, fourth graders seldom use them spontaneously. By encouraging to question one's own learning habits and by promoting more effective strategies, depending on the current, individual learning progress, adaptive prompts may help promote the spontaneous use of said strategies. Based on the general ability of the examined age group to use strategies

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... tely and to challenge their use it was assumed, that they could use the hints the prompts were giving to improve their learning, their finding and assessing of information as well as their evaluation of their learning success. 87 fourth grade students were given a learning target and searched a hypertext for corresponding information. Afterwards they answered questions about the text and subsequently were asked to assess their learning success. Additionally it was recorded, which sites they visited, how often they visited them and if they marked them as important for their learning goal. The prompts had no significant effect on the examined traits. Only exception to that is the significantly higher marking of sites, relevant to the learning goal by the control group. Based on this results, the assumption, that prompts have a positive effect on learning outcome, on evaluation and on the finding as well as the assessing of information, can't be confirmed.