Publish at November 23 2015 Updated May 29 2024
Faced with the plethora of educational software available today, one of the questions on the minds of education professionals in favor of the pedagogical integration of ICT is how to separate the wheat from the chaff. For, while e-learning tools are legion, they are certainly not all equal. And if debates on their effectiveness seem endless, it's because the differences observed in their characteristics sometimes leave us perplexed. So, what makes good educational software?
This is the question that Sjödén Björn, a student in the Department of Cognitive Science at Lund University, Sweden, sets out to answer in his doctoral thesis, soberly entitled " What are the characteristics of good educational software?
In his thesis, Sjödén Björn offers a critical analysis of the main characteristics that make educational software effective learning tools.
To achieve this, he analyzed 100 so-called "educational" applications. Following this analysis, the researcher sets out a number of characteristics inherent in quality educational software. He believes that the relevance of educational software depends on a number of criteria:
These and many other characteristics (re)place cognitive science at the heart of any system for transmitting and acquiring knowledge.
Secondly,Sjödén Björn focuses on how cognitive science can help improve the quality of educational software. To this end, he proposes several types of methodological approach that designers of this type of software should draw on to make them more useful for education. These include observational and quasi-experimental approaches with conceptual replications, to name but a few.
Sjödén Björn does not disavow educational software, but invites teachers to take a more critical look at these tools, whose limits are rarely perceptible. He obviously recognizes their pedagogical potential, but calls for more thought to be given to their design and development. For, as he himself acknowledges:
"digital learning tools can provide great educational benefits, as long as they don't become mere books on a screen, but also put their digital advantages to work.
This involves, for example, providing good feedback, showing that there are different ways of thinking to achieve a goal (...)".
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Reference
Sjödén, B. (2015). What makes good educational software? Lund University Cognitive Studies
https://lup.lub.lu.se/search/publication/7991505
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