ASSISTments is a free online learning tool for improving students' mathematics achievement by providing immediate feedback and hints to students, detailed information on how students performed to teachers, and instructional suggestions for teachers to use. Researchers at the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation conducted an intrinsic,…

Recent advances in automated writing evaluation have enabled educators to use automated writing quality scores to improve assessment feasibility. However, there has been limited investigation of bias for automated writing quality scores with students from diverse racial or ethnic backgrounds. The use of biased scores could contribute to…

Math performance continues to be an important focus for improvement. The most recent National Report Card in the U.S. suggested student math scores declined in the past two years possibly due to COVID-19 pandemic and related school closures. We report on the implementation of a math homework program that leverages AI-based one-to-one technology,…

The Green River Regional Educational Cooperative (GRREC) and its partners administered the STEM-CS intervention to support the professional learning of middle and high school STEM teachers in rural southcentral Kentucky counties. The goals of the STEM-CS intervention were to improve teacher STEM-CS knowledge, practice, implementation, and…

We report on a randomized controlled trial of an intervention that leverages the availability of laptops for all public-school students in the state of Maine. The intervention, called "ASSISTments," provides feedback to students as they solve mathematics homework problems and automatically prepares reports for teachers about student…

We compared students' performance on a paper-based test (PBT) and three computer-based tests (CBTs). The three computer-based tests used different test navigation and answer selection features, allowing us to examine how these features affect student performance. The study sample consisted of 9,698 fourth through twelfth grade students from across…

Well-designed digital games hold promise as effective learning environments. However, designing games that support both learning and engagement without disrupting flow is quite tricky. In addition to including various game design features (e.g., interactive problem solving, adaptive challenges, and player control of gameplay) to engage players,…

Design2Learn (D2L) is a NYC-based afterschool program aimed at increasing middle school students' interest, engagement, and achievement in science. Designed by ExpandED Schools, D2L centers around three core strategies: (1) collaborative teaching between an in-school science teacher and two afterschool educators; (2) curricular bridging, which…

In a randomized field trial with 2,850 seventh-grade mathematics students, we evaluated whether an educational technology intervention increased mathematics learning. Assigning homework is common yet sometimes controversial. Building on prior research on formative assessment and adaptive teaching, we predicted that combining an online homework…

Homework has been a mysterious world to educators due to the fact that it is hard to collect data with regard to homework behaviors. Little is known about when a student works on homework, how long it takes him to complete the homework, how much time he spends on a problem and whether and where he has struggled, etc. Such information not only have…

We detail a learning progressions approach to early algebra research and how existing work around learning progressions and trajectories in mathematics and science education has informed our development of a four-component theoretical framework consisting of: a curricular progression of learning goals across big algebraic ideas; an instructional…

"INSPIRE" is an Investing in Innovation (i3) development grant funded by the Office of Innovation and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education. "INSPIRE" provides an innovative integrated K-12 STEM pipeline approach focused on STEM course content and instructional redesign. The INSPIRE model was implemented in Cabarrus County…

We introduce a cognitive framework for measuring reading comprehension that includes the use of novel summary-writing tasks. We derive NLP features from the holistic rubric used to score the summaries written by students for such tasks and use them to design a preliminary, automated scoring system. Our results show that the automated approach…

In this chapter, we describe several intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) designed to support student literacy through reading comprehension and writing instruction and practice. Although adaptive instruction can be a powerful tool in the literacy domain, developing these technologies poses significant challenges. For example, evaluating the…

ASSISTments is a web-based math tutor designed to address the need for timely student assessment while simultaneously providing instruction, thereby avoiding lost instruction time that typically occurs during assessment. This article presents a quasi-experiment that evaluates whether ASSISTments use has an effect on improving middle school…