ASSISTments (LAEP Inventory)

Synopsis

ASSISTments is an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) developed by Neal Heffernan and colleagues and is researched at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in collaboration with a variety of universities and organisations in the United States. The core system was designed to give progressive hints to students who answer a question incorrectly, in order to simulate the type of instantaneous directed feedback a tutor would provide. From this platform there have been a variety of studies of the system focusing on how to use the student log data generated from the system effectively. For example, studies have been carried out to see how this data can influence parent engagement or predict performance on high stakes tests.

Classification

Inventory type:

learner support tool

analytics for assessment

Role of analytics:

alerting

visualisation

prediction

modeling

recommendation

Data sources:

uses own data

Keywords:

intelligent tutoring system

Tool in Context

Learning:

Secondary Education

Supply model:

privately-hosted software

Origin:

Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Ethics and privacy:

Languages:

English

Maturity and Evidence of Utility

ASSISTments has been used as a research platform from WPI in association with a variety of universities. It has been expanding in terms of adoption. Two hundred and sixteen counties in the United States used the system between 28 February and 28 April 2012.

Further Information

Tool provider’s website: http://bit.ly/1SXSbbh

Highlighted research: http://bit.ly/1X5TCne, http://bit.ly/1P97xWv

Map of US districts that used ASSISTments in spring 2012: http://bit.ly/1X5TlRd