EVOLUTION OF EDUCATIONAL SOFTWARE EVALUATION: INSTRUCTIONAL SOFTWARE ASSESSMENT
Abstract
Many popular terms such as software description, software review, software evaluation and lastly software usability used by design, development and evaluation experts in the field. However, such terms used interchangeably by researchers and developers are syntactically and semantically different due to their conceptual backgrounds and the technical procedures taken in the development or evaluation process. A simple search of the basic terms, software selection, software description, software review, software evaluation, software usability and software assessment in this day and age of electronic databases would yield a large number of "hits" or articles. There are different definitions for such terms. The definitions are used loosely and interchangeably in activities by the researchers and web page developers. The term software assessment is used to encompass the set of terms described in this paper. This allows for evaluating the contributions of specific characteristics to the effectiveness of instructional software anatomy.