Squires, David; Preece, Jennifer J. (1999)
Predicting quality in educational software: Evaluating for learning, usability and the synergy between them
Interacting with Computers, Vol. 11, No. 5, May, pp. 467–483
Keywords: Usability Methods
Review by: Dreier, Matthias (2004-08-09)
Teachers need to be able to evaluate predictively educational software in order to decide what software to purchase for classroom use. Evaluating the usability of educational software is rather difficult, especially if there are no empirical studies available. Squires and Preece have studied predictive evaluations of educational software for several years. They argue that the conventional approach of using checklists has some serious shortcomings. Checklists rely on past usability evaluations and are therefore inadequate for evaluating new and innovative user interfaces. Furthermore, current usability checklists focus on technical rather than educational issues.
The authors propose an approach based on usability heuristics and constructivist principles. First, they outline their socio-constructivist perspective of learning. The focus is on cognitive and contextual authenticity. Then, the authors present a list of socio-constructivist criteria for educational software. Finally, they show how to apply well-known usability heuristics to evaluate software according to the aforementioned criteria.
Evaluating educational software differs from conventional software in at least two points: First, learning how to use the interface distracts users from learning the content. Second, a tenet of constructivism is that people learn from their mistakes. Unfortunately, it is often not possible for a user to distinguish between cognitive mistakes and mistakes caused by usability flaws of the user interface.
This publication provides a comprehensive list of methods to evaluate the usability of educational software. The proposed methods are particularly well suited for constructivist software. A drawback of this approach is that the evaluation is more complex and takes more time. In addition, most teachers are competent to evaluate pedagogical issues but only few of them have a substantial understanding of usability concepts. Therefore, it is not likely that the suggested methods attain widespread use in practice.