EVALUATING LEARNING SOFTWARE IN THE CLASSROOM:
A PRELIMINARY STUDY

Vincent F. DiStasi, Grove City College, vfdistasi@gcc.edu
David J. Ayers, Grove City College, djayers@gcc.edu
William P. Birmingham, Grove City College     wpbirmingham@gcc.edu
Ananda Gunawardena, Carnegie Mellon University,     guna@andrew.cmu.edu
Gary L. Welton, Grove City College, glwelton@gcc.edu

Grove City College is a private, highly selective, comprehensive college with a student population of approximately 2500 students. The College has had a 1:1 mandated student mobile computer program since 1994. To begin the second decade of the mobile computing program, the Class of 2008 was the first class to receive an HP Tablet PC; currently, there are more than 1900 HP Tablet PCs on campus. The proliferation of Tablet PCs has allowed faculty to use different types of learning software in the classroom. For the past year, we have been evaluating software from both faculty and student perspectives. In this paper, we describe the initial results from survey data of approximately 231 students from the Fall 2006 semester. We have found both satisfaction and problems. One of the interesting outcomes is that the students’ perceived purpose of note taking strongly influences the acceptance of the software.