Designing and evaluating an educational performance support system

This paper provides an account of the design of the Lesson Planning System (LPS), a performance support system (PSS) to support novice teacher-education students in learning and performing the complex cognitive task of lesson planning. It also reports on an initial research study to investigate the effectiveness of this software. The LPS is a hypermedia software system, predicated on task performance rather than learning, which has been developed to better understand the nature and potential role of PSSs in teacher education. The principles applied in the design and development of the LPS are relevant to the design of other PSSs across a wide range of task-based activities in the professional development of teachers.