Abstract:

Professional literacy is the process that allows a student to learn how to read and write texts related to his or her profession, and comprehend the different theories, concepts, procedures and methodologies related to it.
The students who begin their professional studies, usually do not have enough resources to cope with complex texts so, a viable alternative to support them is to use virtual learning environments.
So, the objective of this study was to design, develop and evaluate an educational software that encourages professional literacy among students of the Faculty of Psychology at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México. The name given to the software was Intelligent Reading in Psychology (IRP).

Method:
Participants: 71 male and female students, divided into an experimental (45) and a control group (26).

Design: pretest posttest control group with a follow-up for the experimental group.

IRP software consists of a series of exercises and readings that differ in features and complexity. For the selection of the material, teachers from the different fields of knowledge in Psychology were required, and then two modules for the software were designed:

The tutor module: Useful to assess the program impact and to identify progress and needs of each student.

The reader module: It consists of an initial evaluation, a final one and 5 lessons in 20 hours. This module also records the progress of the users considering three indicators: speed, comprehension and reading efficiency (relation between speed and understanding).

Procedure:
Students in the experimental group were enrolled voluntarily and were evaluated at the beginning of the program and at the end of it; they worked once a week in 10 sessions of 2 hours. Students in the control group were evaluated at the same time that the experimental group.

Results:
The results of the using of the software depend to some extent on the background of the users and their previous reading skills (reading strategies, reading habits, prior knowledge of the issues, etc.) so, to analyze IRP effects, participants were grouped according to their reading skills (low, medium and high comprehension) according to their performance of the post evaluation.

In the experimental group, statistically significant increases in speed and reading efficiency were found between pre and post-evaluation in the three groups. (Wilcoxon, p <=. 05), but changes in comprehension levels were significant just for the participants with high reading skills. In the control group there were only positive and statistically significant changes in speed.

In general, users expressed their satisfaction with changes achieved in reading and the use of IRP.

Based on this experience, authors are working on the second version of the software which considers changes in the texts and in the difficulty of the items and writing activities.

Keywords:

Professional literacy, Educational software.