The 1st release of the Terence learner GUI: The user-based usability evaluation

This paper reports the user-based usability evaluations performed in Italy of the first release of the learner Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the TERENCE project. This project aims at developing an adaptive learning system for training the reasoning about stories' events of the TERENCE learners in Italy and in UK. Learners are 7-11 year old children, hearing and deaf, that have difficulties in correlating the events of a story, making inferences about them, and detecting inconsistencies. The evaluation of the first release of the TERENCE adaptive learning system software prototypes tackles their usability in order to quickly reveal possible usability problems, as well as to address the TERENCE team to solve them, before the large scale evaluation. Moreover, authors try to carried out important general issues related to the experiment performance. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013.