Designing TEL products for poor comprehenders: evidences from the evaluation of TERENCE

Abstract

Developing the capabilities to read and comprehend texts is fundamental for the development of children and for their full participation in society. The FP7 European project TERENCE faced the problem of poor text comprehenders and created the first adaptive learning system for text comprehension for primary school children. The paper, after a brief introduction to the research problem behind TERENCE and an overview of the system, reports on the findings of four round of evaluations aimed at assessing both the usability and the psycho-pedagogical effectiveness of the system, and report them as hints useful for researchers and designers.

Keywords

• Technology enhanced learning
• psycho-pedagogical effectiveness
• usability
• poor comprehension