Announcements

Since the shift to distance learning began in March more than 25,000 teacher from all 50 states and internationally have signed up for ASSISTments accounts.

Cristina transitioned from her role as Chief Strategy Officer with The ASSISTments Project @ WPI, in July of 2020. She and her husband, Co-Founder, Neil Heffernan have been innovating and developing ASSISTments since 2003.

How relevant is homework anymore? We're reconsidering the new realities of today’s learning environments and how they can best serve student learning.

Neil Heffernan, professor at WPI, received the largest award in FY 2019 - $4.98 million to scale and expand ASSISTments over the next five years.

A message from Neil Heffernan, introducing a new nonprofit, The ASSISTments Foundation! Building the foundation is an essential step in growing ASSISTments and impacting more students and teachers.

Megan will work alongside Neil & Cristina Heffernan in the leadership of the organization to help us spread ASSISTments across the US. We are looking forward to Megan's non-profit leadership experience as well as her ability to help us grow and scale ASSISTments.

It is important that educators know which interventions and products actually work. In order to accomplish that goal, the U.S. Department of Education hosts the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), an institution that evaluates educational interventions to see which work and which are simply flops. Neil Heffernan provides an update about the WWC’s approval of a study that shows the efficacy of ASSISTments.

Two grants from the Institute for Educational Sciences (IES) totaling over $7 million have been awarded to education researchers studying the impact of ASSISTments. Large and rigorous randomized controlled trials of online education tools for K-12 education are difficult to conduct and analyze. These grants will build upon a prior ASSISTments trial conducted by SRI Education, which was important in that it provided hard, comparative evidence of the impact of education technology.

The What Works Clearinghouse, a highly regarded federal research review of education products, has reviewed the ASSISTments research and stated that the Efficacy Study “meets standards without reservations.”

Protecting student privacy is our top priority. At ASSISTments, we know that our students, parents, and schools have a clear and important right to their own data. Read on to learn how we protect our students' data.

Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), in partnership with The ASSISTments Foundation, has been awarded an $8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Education Innovation and Research (EIR) Program.

The ASSISTments Foundation welcomes Britt Neuhaus will oversee our efforts to scale the ASSISTments online learning tool across the country, with particular attention to rural areas in collaboration with our partners at Lesley University, WestEd and WPI.

The ASSISTments Foundation welcomes Tom Bolton as Vice President of Product to lead the future of the ASSISTments product. Bolton will support ASSISTments in its work to impact users across the country by delivering immediate feedback for math students and data insights for teacher instruction.

We at ASSISTments are concerned about the impact that COVID-19 is having on teaching and learning and are taking steps to support our community of users and team at this time.

Heffernan has received more than $35 million in federal grants for his work in learning sciences and with ASSISTments, in part because he is relentless in pursuing funding from a number of agencies, though he says he “tries more and fails more” in submitting grant applications. Last year ASSISTments was used by more than 2,500 teaches in 46 states and 14 countries.

We are retiring the ASSISTments 1.0 with Google Classroom integration, so that we can dedicate our energy to ASSISTments 2.0, our most up-to-date and teacher-informed version of ASSISTments. We are asking users of this feature to migrate to 2.0, where we will be able to provide you the best possible experience and user support.

We are pleased to announce that we have launched the integration of ASSISTments 2.0 with the Canvas Learning Management System! Teachers with ASSISTments 2.0 accounts can now assign problem sets to students with their Canvas accounts.