News

As ESSER funds wind down, schools face the difficult decision of which resources will remain in the budget. Luckily, free online math assessment tools like ASSISTments can support teachers and students during this transition.

Florida A&M University Developmental Research School (FAMU DRS) and The ASSISTments Foundation are excited to announce a new partnership to improve math achievement for students in grades 3-8 through a high-dosage tutoring initiative.

The ASSISTments Foundation (TAF) is thrilled to announce that it has been awarded a $250,000 grant from NewSchools Venture Fund. This grant will support the launch of “ASSISTments Powered”, an initiative to help schools implement high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) to support equitable math gains across students with varying academic levels.

Kendall Hunt and ASSISTments are excited to announce a strategic partnership that unites Kendall Hunt’s industry-leading math curriculum services with ASSISTments’ innovative digital practice and formative assessment platform.

The ASSISTments Foundation is pleased to announce a significant organizational transition with the appointment of Cristina Heffernan and Britt Neuhaus as co-Executive Directors. This move represents a key step in our effort to scale ASSISTments, in response to growing demand for evidence-based math solutions across the education field.

We are excited to announce an upcoming project to develop a conversational artificial intelligence (AI) tutor, CAIT, to address the needs of students who may have fallen behind in math class but cannot afford tutoring services.

Discover how Worcester Polytechnic Institute's research, featured in Forbes, is shaping the future of education with AI.

We’ll be hosting a workshop at NCTM 2023 on Wednesday, October 26th at 11am. We’ll be joined by middle school math teacher, Alfons Prince, as he shares his journey of turning his classroom into a hub of data-informed teaching and learning.

Research Validates ASSISTments' Role in Improving Math Achievement, Equity, and Teacher Practice, Unveiling Long-Term Learning Gains and Promising Results for Historically Marginalized Students

ASSISTments will provide four university machine learning research teams with access to the largest dataset of digitized student work for the purpose of designing AI enabled technology to read, analyze, and score digitized student math work, and provide learning insights to math teachers.

In a recent EdWeek article, a teacher from Los Angeles highlighted the struggle to understand what ideas students' are finding the most difficult to grasp, and how use of our tutoring materials can help bridge this gap.

The ASSISTments Foundation (ASSISTments) with partners Teaching Lab and WestEd, is pleased to announce our recent award of a five-year $8 million Education Innovation and Research (EIR) Mid-Phase Project grant.

ASSISTments announced the winners of the first MathNet Competition. Three university machine learning research teams to design AI enabled technology to analyze student math work to provide learning insights to math teachers.

How do we make kids both math-competent and math-confident? In a new Psychology Today article from Ulrich Boser, founder of the Learning Agency, discover the importance of teacher-student relationships, growth mindset, and how education technology tools like ASSISTments can help.

ASSISTments, a nonprofit organization founded in learning-science, recently announced it has been awarded $250,000 in competitive grant funding to pilot an innovative tutoring program in Baltimore City Public Schools (City Schools) across 30 schools, reaching 800 underserved students in grades 3-8. The ASSISTments Tutoring pilot will research the effects of high-dosage, proactive school-based tutoring that is directly connected to classroom instruction.

Cristina Heffernan, Executive Director of The ASSISTments Foundation, joins the Policy 2050 Podcast to discuss how better student assessment data can transform education and set up the next generation for success.

At NCTM Baltimore on December 1st at 1 pm ET, join the ASSISTments Co-founder and Executive Director, Cristina Heffernan, as she highlights how formative tools like ASSISTments can help save you time and help you meet the needs of all students - no matter what your experience level may be.

Join us at NCSM 2022 for an interactive session on how to build confidence, consistency, and capacity – across all math classrooms using ASSISTments!

ASSISTments, an educational platform developed by WPI researchers, uses immediate feedback in math formative assessments to improve learning outcomes.

The pandemic illustrated that technology cannot replace teaching. Still, when it comes to formative assessment, a proven instructional method, there’s a lot tech can do to aid teachers and help accelerate learning.

Read how ASSISTments helps teachers and students from the perspective of a sixth grade math teacher in this post by WickedLocal!

As we return to in-person instruction, edtech can settle back into a more suitable role to supplement and enhance instruction, while, at the same time, drawing some important lessons from the pandemic experience.

Automated feedback can supplement in-person instruction by making teachers’ jobs easier while personalizing student experience.

In March 2021, XPRIZE launched the $1M Digital Learning Challenge to modernize, accelerate, and improve effective learning tools, processes and outcomes. ASSISTments is one of the ten Pilot Phase teams.

A one-size-fits-all approach to education does not work for students.

ASSISTment’s AI feature Quick-Comments won an $8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Education Innovation and Research program to improve its machine-learning tutoring functions.

For this week’s data science career series, Analytics India Magazine got in touch with Neil Heffernan, the computer science professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Learn why ASSISTments has applied to the X-Prize competition

There is also a bigger movement around teacher-driven research, which can leverage the knowledge of those who work most closely with students and lead to faster results from research in order to impact instruction. One example of this can be seen in a study done by Bill Hinkley, a math teacher who uses ASSISTments, an online math tool to explore how the use of pencil and paper to solve math problems affects his students.

American students are being left behind and outpaced by competitors like China. But [there is] the opportunity to change the way we teach math in order to help our children achieve prosperous futures.

Neil Heffernan talks about augmented reality, intelligent tutoring systems and the need for better research infrastructure in ed tech.

This five-year grant, led by TAF Co-Founder and Executive Director Cristina Heffernan, will be used to further develop ASSISTments’ innovative tutoring technology, which leverages teacher- and student-facing tools for core instruction. This project will focus on high-needs middle school math students and their teachers at more than 150 schools. 

A team for the ASSISTments digital learning platform will expand its infrastructure to allow researchers to run studies using OER within ASSISTments.

We are excited to highlight the content and teacher support resources we’ve developed in partnership with JUMP Math.

We are excited to highlight our partnership with Open Up Resources! You now have access to all of the available student-facing materials in both the Open Up Resources 6-8 and Open Up High School Mathematics curricula. This content is available to assign through ASSISTments (for free) and provides students with immediate feedback as they work. You'll also receive real-time data to help: save you time, target instruction, and to support serving a diverse group of learners.

Each year, teachers across the country are faced with the challenge of addressing unfinished learning. The ongoing COVID-19 crisis makes that task even more difficult. But in Louisiana, addressing unfinished learning is particularly precarious. Learn what teachers are going through within the Accelerate initiative, in partnership with ASSISTments and the Lousiana Department of Education.

CenterPoint’s Fresh Start Screener in mathematics is now available through ASSISTment’s platform. The Fresh Start Screener helps teachers evaluate student understanding of content taught in the prior grade, gauge areas of strengths and unfinished learning, and chart their path forward. 

Analytics India Magazine got in touch with ASSISTments co-founder, Neil Heffernan, to share his views on data science.

Read this article for three central insights that ASSISTments cofounders, Neil and Cristina Heffernan, think drive learning in distance learning scenarios.

As schools around the country adopted remote learning last spring and this fall, demand for tutoring shot up. Read more in this article by ASSISTments co-founders Neil T. Heffernan and Cristina Heffernan

U.S. Education Department found only three technologies met stringent criteria for being effective. ASSISTments was one of them. Read more in this article by Jill Barshay in The Hechinger Report.

Listen to this podcast about effective teaching and distance learning tools including ASSISTments.

In January 2021, IES/What Works Clearinghouse published a review that looked at 932 studies evaluating the effects of distance learning practices or programs on student academic outcomes. ASSISTments is one of only 4 programs that came out with their top rating.

ASSISTments co-founder Cristina Heffernan shares a few things she’s especially excited about for 2021, and thinks you will be too.

Neil Heffernan and Cristina Heffernan, founders of ASSISTments, explain why ASSISTments forever-free accounts support students' math learning.

Listen to this podcast where ASSISTments co-founder Dr. Neil Heffernan joins Michael Palmer to talk about how his career interweaves great teaching, computer science, and “ASSISTments” – a set of digital tools designed to make homework assignment and evaluation more efficient.

Watch ASSISTments co-founders Neil and Cristina Heffernan speak on adaptive tutors in Justin Reich's book club.

A Worcester Polytechnic Institute professor is spearheading innovative crowdsourcing research to help educators and students.

An online math teaching tool developed at Worcester Polytechnic Institute has been used by thousands of teachers adjusting to distance learning during the pandemic.

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.

(Opportunity now closed) ASSISTments seeking diverse 7th grade math teachers with experience using Engage NY and/or Eureka Math for a paid opportunity to support the development of two new features within our platform.

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.

Read more about our work on using teacher crowdsourcing to improve student learning in this article by Jill Barshay in The Hechinger Report.

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.

ASSISTments was developed by husband and wife duo Neil and Cristina Heffernan.As a professor of computer science and learning technologies, Neil is able to collaborate with fellow professors, researchers and PhD students to enhance the ASSISTments platform. As a former middle school math teacher Cristina keeps the project focused on teachers.

Ashish is a PhD student in Computer Science

Brian Story is an ASSISTments Teacher Engagement Manager in North Carolina. Learn more about Brian!

Cindy is excited to be on the team because it will allows to "have a positive impact on math teaching and learning while also learning about best teaching practices and working with ASSISTments."

Donna Lee Tignor is a long-time ASSISTments teacher mentor. Read how she started with ASSISTments!

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.

Dr. Sarah Irish has been involved with ASSISTments since the Maine Replication Study! Learn about Sarah's experience as an ASSISTments user and teacher mentor.

As a Project Coordinator, JA arranges the content building for all the curricula on ASSISTments! Read more about JA's background and passion for education.

John Erickson is a PhD student in Data Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Dr. Ostrow is a Research Scientist at Worcester Polytechnic Institute

March is the senior PhD student in the ASSISTments lab! March is passionate about machine learning and AI, and serves as a supervisor to his fellow PhD students.

Meet Meghana, a Masters student who works in the ASSISTments lab!

‍A study conducted at MIT's Poverty Action Lab was recently featured in the U.S. News & World Report concluded that ASSISTments is one of two promising educational technologies in the US. The study praised ASSISTments for its impact on student learning and the tool’s compatibility with schools’ existing curricula and textbooks.

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.

“We had the guts to expose ourselves” to randomized control trials, says ASSISTments founder Neil Heffernan in this US News & World Report article

The Boston Globe profiles ASSISTments founder Neil Heffernan, who tells the story of his experience as a middle school math teacher and how a brain tumor inspired him to start ASSISTments.

Listen in to Neil Heffernan on wbur radio show Here & Now.

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.

Podcast interview with ASSISTments co-founders Neil and Cristina Heffernan about their inspiration for ASSISTments, their dedication to research-backed impact and what’s next for the online platform.

Middle school math classes have worked in much the same way for decades. Teachers send students home with a textbook and a set of problems. Students work out the solutions on paper and bring the answers in the next day. That changed at about 40 Maine schools, where students, mostly seventh-graders, tested out ASSISTments.

A veteran math teacher puts ASSISTments to the test and reports on how second-year algebra students learn to persevere in completing homework assignments through the use of the online homework platform. She showcases the tool’s ability to deliver instant feedback and embed video explanations in problem sets.

Researchers are using tools borrowed from medicine and economics to figure out what works best in the classroom. Much of the new research goes beyond the simple metric of standardized tests to study learning in progress and the findings are beginning to fill in some blanks in that hugely complex puzzle called education.

Results of a randomized control trial conducted by SRI Educational Research in public schools in Maine and published in the journal AERA Open by the American Education Research Association clearly quantify the benefits of ASSISTments.‍ The study shows that ASSISTments is effective in helping close the learning gap.

The New York Times profiles husband and wife team, Neil and Cristina Heffernan, and how they chose to address the achievement gap through a computer program that can mimic the individualized feedback of a human tutor.‍

Read about the impact ASSISTmennts is having in two schools in Walpole, Massachusetts. Students whose teachers use the software say it’s like taking their teacher home with them.

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.”

While many EdTech tools and solutions might show promising results in small studies or certain conditions, very few prove effective at scale. That is not the case with ASSISTments. Led by Worcester Polytechnic Institute Professor Neil Heffernan, the free classroom assessment software has been shown to bring about remarkable academic gains. Read on to learn the story of how ASSISTments came to be and some of the challenges along the way.‍

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 use of technology is growing in schools, but we’re missing critical opportunities if technology isn’t being used to close the pernicious achievement gaps between students of color and their white peers and between low-income students and their more affluent peers. WPI professor and ASSISTments founder Neil Heffernan weighs in on the importance of using tech tools to address inequity in schools.

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.

Over the past 13 years, ASSISTments was developed and evaluated with the support of a series of IES and National Science Foundation awards. With a 2003 IES award to Carnegie Mellon University and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), researchers created the first version of ASSISTments.

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.

With schools around the country closed, educators are being asked to support at-home learning. University of Toronto Professor Philip Oreopoulos speaks of promising educational programs like ASSISTments, which has resulted in impressive academic gains in multiple randomized controlled trials.

The ASSISTments Foundation is committed to providing high quality opportunities that support our teachers as they use ASSISTments and lead in their own classrooms and beyond. ASSISTments Ambassador Andrew Burnett spreads the word about ASSISTments across many platforms including his blog, social media and at national education conferences.