Translating Educational Theory Into Educational Software: A Case Study of the Adaptive Map Project
Jacob Moore, Michel Pascale, Christopher Bryant Williams, Chris L. North · 2020
Abstract TRANSLATING EDUCATIONAL THEORY INTO EDUCATIONAL SOFTWARE: A CASE STUDY OF THE ADAPTIVE MAP PROJECT As part of the larger Adaptive Map project, this paper discusses the process and challengesencountered translating educational theory into learning software and then evaluating thatsoftware for both usability and as a learning aid. The Adaptive Map is an organization and navigation tool for digital content, allowing a largenumber of content pages to be linked together visually into a coherent roadmap for theinformation. Replacing the table of contents or home page for traditional digital textbooks, theconcept map based system explicitly shows how each bit of information fits into the whole of thecourse with a large node-link diagram. This explicit mapping of expert knowledge structures hasbeen shown to promote conceptual understanding in students. Because concept maps becomevisually cluttered and unusable when they get too large though, an interactive visualization toolwas developed to maintain the advantages of concept maps as learning tools while managing thevisual clutter in maps that cover entire courses or even an entire curriculum. In this paper, the authors discuss the process of integrating the educational literature with theinformation visualization and usability engineering literature to understand how to best make atool that is user friendly enough that students want to use it and is built to promote learning whenit is used. The process of translating general educational theory into specific software designchoices is discussed. The challenges involved in evaluating learning software where usabilityand learning are intertwined are addressed, and preliminary results detailing the usability andlearning gains associated with the Adaptive Map are presented.