Many researchers advocated the significance of metacognition in text comprehension (Baker & Brown, 1984). Promoting self-awareness, monitoring, and regulation of text comprehension has proved to be a critically important aspect of skilled reading (Mokhtari & Reichard, 2002). While navigating online information sources which are based on hypertext and hypermedia technologies, readers constantly make decisions about where to go next, what links might be relevant to their current goals. It is therefore important for readers to be aware and regulate both their comprehension and navigation strategies. Foltz (1996) points out that "a model of hypertext comprehension must consider both the information the reader gains from the text and how that information can affect the reader's choice of strategies for proceeding through the text". Hypertext readers need to make thoughtful decisions about what paths to follow and be able to integrate the knowledge acquired from the different text fragments. They therefore need metacognitive strategies for navigation.A study conducted by Stylianou, Puntambekar & Papanastasiou (under review) showed that there was a significant negative interaction of students' metacognitive awareness and perceived use of reading strategies while reading from traditional texts and the presence of metanavigation support (support that encouraged students to monitor and regulate their navigation strategies) while interacting with online materials. The metanavigation support seemed not to have helped students who reported not frequently using metacognitive reading strategies while reading academic material to gain a rich understanding of the domain. In order to explore further this negative relationship, we compared the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies of students who received metanavigation support and those who have not.The participants of this study were 121 sixth grade students. We assessed students' metacognitive awareness and perceived use of reading strategies while reading school-related materials through the Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory (MARSI) (Mokhtari & Reichard, 2002). MARSI was a pre-assessment measure that was administered at the beginning of an experimental study which aimed to investigate whether supporting students to monitor and regulate their navigation behavior would lead to a rich understanding of domain knowledge.MARSI consisted of 30 Likert-type items with a 5-point response format which represented three subscales: Global Reading Strategies, Problem-Solving Strategies and Support Reading Strategies. We used Item Response Theory and particularly the Inverse Partial Credit Model (Hadjidemetriou & Williams, 2004) to scale up the MARSI instrument and identify which strategies students used most when reading school-related materials. Our results indicate that, at a pre-assessment level, there were no significant differences between students who received metanavigation support and those who did not regarding their metacognitive awareness of reading strategies. We found that sixth grade students used most frequently problem solving reading strategies such as re-reading text, adjusting reading speed and concentrating on text. On the contrary, they seemed to use less often supporting strategies such as focusing on the structure of the text (i.e. skimming the text and noting characteristics like length and organization), finding relationships among ideas in the text, thinking whether the content of the text fits their reading purpose and asking themselves questions they would like to have answered in the text. These results suggest that while reading from online materials that present text in a nonlinear format, it is important to employ strategies such as noting the structure of the text, concentrating on reading goals and finding relationships among important ideas which might appear in different text fragments. The findings of this study stress out the important role of metacognition in navigating and learning from hypertext and point out several interesting pedagogical issues. Students need to learn how to become more reflective while reading.Baker, L., & Brown, A. L. (1984). Cognitive monitoring in reading. In J. Flood (Ed.), Understanding reading comprehension (pp. 353-394). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.Foltz, P.W. (1996) Comprehension, Coherence and Strategies in Hypertext and Linear Text. In J. F. Rouet, J. J. Levonen, A. P. Dillon & R. J. Spiro (Eds.) Hypertext and Cognition (pp. 109-136). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Hadjidemetriou, C. & Williams J.S. (2004). Using Rasch Models to Identify Contours of Teachers' Knowledge. Journal of Applied Measurement, 5(3), 243-257. Mokhtari, K., & Reichard, C. A. (2002). Assessing students' metacognitive awareness of reading strategies. Journal of Educational Psychology, 94(2), 249-259. Stylianou, A., Puntambekar, S., & Papanastasiou, E. (under review). Submitted to the conference Computer Supported Collaborative Learning, 2007. Computers in Education