SI2-SSE: Adding Research Accounts to the ASSISTments' Platform: Helping Researchers Do Randomized Controlled Studies with Thousands of Students

Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester MA

Investigators

Abstract

ASSISTments is a free, university-based platform created to perform controlled experiments with the potential to help increase the quality, speed, and reliability of results related to K12 education. ASSISTments' mission is "to improve education through scientific research while not compromising student learning time." Each day, teachers assign problems to thousands of students (currently 50,000 students) in ASSISTments. These problem sets often contain controlled experiments. ASSISTments has used this platform to do controlled experiments that have resulted in 17 peer-reviewed publications. For a typical education researcher, developing relationships with schools is costly. ASSISTments has built relationships with teachers and researchers to run experiments to improve education without disrupting classrooms. This project will add researcher accounts to ASSISTments to better facilitate the research process. Researchers will create their own experiments, get approval from WPI for release to teachers, and get anonymized data. ASSISTments will reach out to its community of teachers who trust ASSISTments, to invite them to run the study in their classrooms. The intellectual merit of this work will be the contribution of the studies that this system would support. ASSISTments' ten-year goal is to have a community of hundreds of scientists that use this tool to do their studies. Psychologists tend to study human learning in lab studies; researchers in education and learning sciences point out that it's not clear if those studies generalize to K12. These communities need to work together, but are lacking common ground. Thousands of researchers in psychology, mathematics education, and learning sciences care about using science to better understand human learning. Some researchers study how to help students with motivational messages, spaced retesting, or comparing feedback. Many researchers have used thousands of psychology undergraduates as subjects, but want their ideas tested and validated in authentic K12 settings. Everyone understands physicists need a shared scientific instrument to do their work, but so do educational psychologists. The broader impact of this work will be as a demonstration, showing how a tool could be built that helps many researchers conduct controlled experiments. This will include showing how the project can increase the efficiency of the scientists? work.