A Framework for Applying Educational Psychology Principles to the Design and Assessment of Learning Technology

Abstract

Nowadays, it is safe to say that technology is involved directly or indirectly in all professions and academic fields. Therefore it is common for software engineers to find themselves in multidisciplinary projects that require knowledge and skills different than their own. In this paper, a novel framework for designing and evaluating learning applications is proposed. It is intended for software engineers who may not have the assistance of educators to apply the basic principles of educational psychology while developing an edtech solution. This framework is presented as a ready-to-use questionnaire to guide anyone who wants to evaluate a learning technology, thus leveraging collaboration between experts with diverse backgrounds. In order to assess its suitability, we present a use case showing the application of this framework on an actual educational software.