This draft checklist applies aspects of empirically based learning theories to assess the usefulness of a software program to increase learning of someone unfamiliar with the content and processes of the program. These theories emerge from objective, experimental behavior studies. This checklist supplements common sense evaluations users conduct, such as answering questions about whether a buyer likes, wants, and can afford the program,
Why Bother with a Checklist?
In short, a checklist permits systematic description of software most likely to maximize learning rates of specific content by users.
Educators and educational software developers use a wide range of theories, principles, and ad hoc arrangements of tasks and criteria to claim that a program increases learning. In this sense, a theory describes systematic, replicable explanations of cause – effect relationships between specific, measurable variables. This checklist offers a way to describe specific learning theories and empirical bases for them used to create a software program.
In addition, educators and developers also use a wide range of learning and instructional strategies and tactics, ranging from self-discovery to direct instruction to direct learning. To complicate the situation further, individual teachers and home schoolers uniquely adapt use of software for a variety of reasons with individual and groups of learners. This checklist offers a way to describe specific instructional and assessment procedures and their empirical bases to create a software program.
A relatively small number of software programs use a technically consistent, coherent, empirically derived learning theories (e.g., Zeaman and House, Two Choice Visual Discrimination Analysis; Skinner, Stimulus-Response) or set of instructional theories (e.g., Gold, Try Another Way).
As a result, educational software may appear appealing to a learner, but the content leads to less learning than possible. For example, programmers may use colors and movements to stimulate learner attention. However, student responses to these stimuli may follow an inefficient path to an unspecified learning criterion. Other programs may appear unappealing to an educator, but, according to empirical evidence, they will likely lead to superior learning rates.
This checklist identifies (or more likely allows users to infer) learning principles and priorities used to say something exists as educational and not entertainment or some other kind of software. Usually, an evaluator must infer learning principles from the format, sequence of tasks, arrangement of prompts, etc. of the presentations of the software.
Parents and teachers may use this checklist as a guide for clarifying two main points about a software program. First, what is to be learned? Second, how does use of this software lead to that learning? These are conventional generic effectiveness and efficiency questions adapted to evaluate educational software.
Software developers may use this checklist to determine if they have addressed generic educational learning criteria they intend to offer.
The checklist addresses seven educational software domains drawn from conventional criteria used to offer confident instruction: assumptions; learning content and processes; prerequisite skills; delineated specific learning criteria; mediation requirements for use; research base; and empirical field test reports.