

Article 610 of comp.cog-eng:
Path: mimsy!haven!uflorida!ukma!psuvm.bitnet!cunyvm!byuvax!fordjm
>From: [email-masked]
Newsgroups: comp.cog-eng
Subject: Educational Software Evaluation Methods?
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
Date: 4 Sep 88 23:35:32 GMT
Lines: 24

I am preparing to conduct a formal evaluation of a piece of
educational software that I have been working on.  One thing I would
like to do as part of this evaluation is to have the program keep a
"LOG" file which records each student decision, the elapsed time
between decsions, whether an option is chosen using the menu, window
buttons, command keys, etc. (this is a Mac application), as well as
various other types of information about the changing state of the
program.

Has anyone had experience doing this kind of tracking?  Are there any
particular things I should watch out for or be sure to include?  I am
also gathering posttest data on the students' mastery of the
objectives addressed by the software (pretesting is not feasible) and
I am observing each of their sessions.  Are there any other
particularly good evaluation methods for educational software that I
should try?  I am particularly interested in methods used to evaluate
intelligent tutoring systems and other education-oriented AI
applications.

Please e-mail responses and I will summarize and post.

John M. Ford         <[email-masked]>