Predicting quality in educational software: Evaluating for learning, usability and the synergy between them

Teachers need to be able to evaluate predictively educational software so t hat they can make decisions about what software to purchase and how to use software in classrooms. The conventional approach to predictive evaluation is to use a checklist. We argue that checklists are seriously flawed in pri nciple because they do not encompass a consideration of learning issues. Mo re particularly they fail to adopt a socio-constructivist view of learning. We propose an approach that adapts the idea of usability heuristics by tak ing account of a socio-constructivist learning perspective. This leads to a set of 'learning with software' heuristics. A notable feature of these heu ristics is that they attend to the integration of usability and learning is sues. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.