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 that 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 principle because they do not encompass a consideration of learning issues. More particularly they fail to adopt a socio-constructivist view of learning. We propose an approach that adapts the idea of usability heuristics by taking account of a socio-constructivist learning perspective. This leads to a set of 'learning with software' heuristics. A notable feature of these heuristics is that they attend to the integration of usability and learning issues. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.