Neil Heffernan III

The purpose of this project is to develop a conversational artificial intelligence (AI) tutor (CAIT- pronounced as "Kate") to support independent math practice for middle school students who struggle with math and, otherwise, may not have access to after-school tutoring. CAIT will be integrated into ASSISTments, an existing, freely available, and evidence-based online math platform with widely used homework assignments from open education resources (OER). Through this work, the project team ...

The purpose of this project is to conduct a systematic replication study of a highly promising mathematics learning intervention, interleaved practice, in 7th grade classrooms. Though psychologists have long known that interleaving and spacing improves long-term learning, the practice problems in most mathematics curricula are arranged so that the majority of problems relating to the same skill or concept are blocked together. With the interleaved practice intervention, some of the practice ...

The goal of this project is to make education research more widely available and efficient by building the necessary infrastructure for an existing online digital platform. The new infrastructure that will be built during this project will enable researchers to run studies within open education resources (OER). An additional goal is to help researchers explore ways to increase student learning for the 500,000 students who use the ASSISTments digital platform. Educators need to know what work...

The purpose of this project is to develop novel methodology to estimate treatment effects from randomized controlled trials (RCTs), while incorporating large observational remnant data and cutting-edge machine learning prediction algorithms to improve precision. The statistical precision of effect estimates from an RCT is limited by the RCT's sample size, which itself is typically subject to a number of practical constraints, such as cost. In many cases, RCT estimates may be too imprecise to...

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of the fully developed intervention, ASSISTments. ASSISTments is an online formative assessment and tutoring platform in mathematics that provides coached, practice problem-solving support for students and cognitive diagnostic reports to teachers, supports students' mathematics homework completion, and facilitates differentiated instruction.

The National Center for Cognition and Mathematics Instruction has a core goal of redesigning components of a widely-used middle school mathematics curriculum-Connected Mathematics Project (CMP), and evaluating the efficacy of the redesigned curriculum materials.