The 1st Release of the TERENCE Learner GUI: The User-Based Usability Evaluation - 2nd International Workshop on Evidence-Based Technology Enhanced Learning - page 1

The 1st Release of the TERENCE Learner GUI:
The User-Based Usability Evaluation

Maria Rosita Cecilia, Tania Di Mascio, and Alessandra Melonio

Abstract. This paper reports the user-based usability evaluations performed in Italy
of the first release of the learner Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the TERENCE
project. This project aims at developing an adaptive learning system for training the
reasoning about stories' events of the TERENCE learners in Italy and in UK. Learn-
ers are 7-11 year old children, hearing and deaf, that have difficulties in correlating
the events of a story, making inferences about them, and detecting inconsistencies.
The evaluation of the first release of the TERENCE adaptive learning system soft-
ware prototypes tackles their usability in order to quickly reveal possible usabil-
ity problems, as well as to address the TERENCE team to solve them, before the
large scale evaluation. Moreover, authors try to carried out important general issues
related to the experiment performance.

1 Introduction

The main reason to concentrate our effort on evaluating the usability of the TER-
ENCE Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) before the large scale evaluation mainly
derives from the fact that, as well described in the [3] survey, “...the approaches
used to evaluate Adaptive Learning Systems (ASLs) are similar in one aspect: they