Evaluation plan of TERENCE: When the user-centred design meets the evidence-based approach

Abstract

TERENCE is an FP7 EU project that aims at developing an adaptive learning system with the twofold objective of helping children in improve deep text understanding, and supporting teachers in their daily work. The present paper focuses on the design of the evaluation of the pedagogical effectiveness and the usability of the TERENCE software. It starts from the user-centred design experience, evidence-based medicine, psychology, and from discussions about statistical methods and ethics considerations. The objective is to provide an innovative, evidence-based and efficient support, for children and teachers, that could be an efficient alternative to the traditional method of reading, so as to prevent and reduce problems of text comprehension that represent a public health and social problem. For this purpose, we developed an evaluation protocol within a reading laboratory in collaboration with teachers, to be hosted in the school structures that will join the project in Italy. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.