Online Mathematics Homework Program Developed at Worcester Polytechnic Institute to be the Subject of More Than $7 Million in Rigorous Research Studies

Quick summary:

Two grants from the Institute for Educational Sciences (IES) totaling over $7 million have been awarded to education researchers studying the impact of ASSISTments. These grants build upon a prior ASSISTments trial conducted by SRI Education in 2012, which was important in that it provided hard, comparative evidence of the impact of education technology.

The first, a four-year, $3.3 million replication project awarded to SRI International, WPI, and North Carolina State University, is intended to analyze mathematics test scores among a more diverse sample of students. It will include nearly 200 teachers and 10,400 seventh-grade students in 66 public middle or junior high schools across North Carolina, which researchers find provides a demographic sampling that is more representative of the entire nation and thus more likely to reliably reflect the impact of the program.

The second grant, a five-year, $3.8 million project, will be conducted by the American Institutes for Research (AIR), one of the world’s largest behavioral and social science research and evaluation organizations. It will evaluate the efficacy of ASSISTments on learning among roughly 15,000 seventh-grade students in seven geographically, culturally, and economically diverse sites across the United States.

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