Meta-Cognitive Tool Development for History Teaching: Investigating how Software Usability Affects Student Achievements

This paper presents a Meta-Cognitive Tool (MCT) development for history teaching. It was developed to support teaching history of civilization courses at the engineering faculty. It covers hierarchically arranged concept maps which are presented dynamically by using Extensible Markup Language (XML) files. MCTs are integrated in e-learning portals to support self-learning. MCTs were investigated in terms of the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) discipline to evaluate their usability in online courses. For this purpose, relationships between learners’ cognitive abilities, individual differences, and usability of e-learning portal were considered in order to create a model between individual differences and software usability. The usability of MCT was evaluated by 116 (70 male, 46 female) subjects who were registered for the HUM1005 History of Civilization I, a general elective course at the faculty of engineering. They completed four different surveys: an IQ survey, a personality survey, a motivation survey, and a software usability measurement inventory (SUMI). This research compares intelligence, personal factors, and motivation factors with the personal software usability results in order to determine the correlations and associations between the usability of the software and learners’ individual differences. In the study, results show that the usability of any education tool has effect on achievement of the learner. Noteworthy, a correlation was found between Grade Point Average (GPA) and usability scores.