Applying Pedagogical Usability for Designing a Mobile Learning Application that Support Reading Comprehension ^†

The pedagogical usability is an important characteristic of applications that support learning as it relates to the added value students perceive while using it for learning. A good pedagogical usability means that an application has more chances to be accepted and used by the students thus raising the possibilities that students actually will learn with it. However important, this concept tends to be neglected by many authors. In this work we show how this concept can be applied to evaluate an application by presenting a real example of an application that has been re-designed to improve its usability, thus showing how pedagogical usability can be operationalized to be applied in general. The application shown in this work is called RedCoMulApp (Reading Collaborative Multiple-option Application) and its goal is to raise the reading comprehension ability of 12th grade high school students. In order to capture the pedagogical usability, we used 12 metrics to design a questionnaire with 26 questions to be answered with a 5-point Likert-scale, plus two open-ended questions to capture aspects that were positively valued, and those that should be improved. The results for the pedagogical usability allow us to validate that the design of the application was perceived by the students as pedagogically useful to learning about reading comprehension.