George W. McConkie
Beckman Institute, and Department of Educational Psychology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

When I entered graduate school in Psychology at Stanford University in the 1960's, I was told that computer technology could be used for instruction in ways that would soon revolutionize the nation's educational system, if not replace it. In one sense, computers have made great changes in schools: they have greatly aided the business offices, record keeping, scheduling and secretarial work of every school system in the country. Many types of reports can now be generated in a fraction of the time that would have been required in the 1960's, which has made it easier for government to request reports with increasing frequency and detail. But no revolution has yet occurred in the classroom.

There has certainly been some change, with computer courses becoming an expected part of the curriculum, calculators being used in math classes, and time provided for students to participate in simulations such as Oregon Trail and to type their reports into the computer and get them printed out. But this seems far from the revolution that has been predicted and eagerly anticipated for nearly 40 years.

At the same time, it is easy to produce a list of ways that well-designed computer programs should be able to aid students in learning math, foreign languages, chemistry, writing skills, music reading, automobile diagnosis, and other subjects. The potential market is immense and literally thousands of programs have been written to meet this need, but very few have been widely adopted or, if adopted, have had staying power. Some have blamed this failure on the reluctance of the educational system itself to adopt innovations, or the lack of accessibility to computers in the classroom; while there may be some truth to this, my own belief is that, if the instructional software had been highly beneficial, parents would have taken the initiative to make sure that their children had access to it, and college students would have purchased it on their own.

It seems reasonable to believe that we have not yet learned how to make educational software sufficiently human-centered, in the sense of being (1) beneficial and helpful, (2) intuitive and easy to use, and (3) pleasant and appealing, especially over the long term. I will make some suggestions related to each of these points, drawing from an attempt to provide computer assistance to aid children with reading disabilities, a current Beckman Institute interdisciplinary research project, funded by Yamaha Motor Corp., that is studying issues related to the development of an appealing human-computer interface, and other sources.