| NSF Org: |
DGE Division Of Graduate Education |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | March 12, 2008 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | September 23, 2011 |
| Award Number: | 0742503 |
| Award Instrument: | Continuing Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Laura Regassa
DGE Division Of Graduate Education EDU Directorate for STEM Education |
| Start Date: | May 15, 2008 |
| End Date: | April 30, 2014 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $2,090,700.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $2,090,700.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2009 = $831,906.00 FY 2011 = $848,813.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
100 INSTITUTE RD WORCESTER MA US 01609-2280 (508)831-5000 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
100 INSTITUTE RD WORCESTER MA US 01609-2280 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | GRAD TEACHING FELLOWS IN K-12 |
| Primary Program Source: |
04000809DB NSF Education & Human Resource 04000910DB NSF Education & Human Resource 04001112DB NSF Education & Human Resource |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.076 |
ABSTRACT
The goal of the Partnership Implementing Mathematics & Science Education (PIMSE) project is to promote the development of graduate students into Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) professionals whose knowledge and skills will support them in their professional and scientific careers. This project provides computer science graduate students -- GK-12 Fellows -- with teaching experience in science or math by being involved in developing and testing the ASSISTment System -- a web-based intelligent tutoring system (http://www.assistment.org/). As part of their Fellowship, GK-12 Fellows are paired with participating GK12 teachers the Worcester Public Schools (WPS) to develop new content for the ASSISTment System. This System innovatively uses the amount of tutoring a student needs to answer questions as an assessment of their understanding of mathematics and science. The students working with the Fellows will learn about implementing technology and how to conduct Learning Sciences experiments in classrooms. The cooperating teachers will increase their content knowledge, and this will contribute to their professional growth. Society will gain by having more scientists and academicians who have a deep understanding of the challenges and needs of public schools. Finally, the inquiry tutoring that the Fellows develop will be available to all middle schools students via the ASSISTment web-site. Special web-site based tools will be available for teachers on the best ways to use the data derived from the ASSISTment System and how to use it to improve their teaching.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
WPI's Partnerships in Math and Science Education has had multiple positive outcomes. First, many graduate students were trained under the program using the GK12 method of sending them to work in K-12 classroom. They learned communication skills through that process.
WPI’s implementation of our GK12 project had additional unique features not found in the typical GK12 project. Graduate students mostly did research work on ASSISTments and gained valuable experiences in observing it's use which helped design new software features, and conducted experiments to see if these improvements lead to better student achievement.
Some of the outputs included: the ASSISTments cyber-infrastructure; open data sets; scientific contributions (ie papers); and some great graduate students.
We talk about the ASSISTments cyber-infrastructure which during the project has morphed from a project used by WPI to conduct scientific research to an open scientific platforms used by 10 different universities. Said another way, the system used to benefit the PI’s (Neil Heffernan) CV but now benefits over a dozen scientific researchers in doing their work. On July 28, 2014, Dr. Heffernan held a webinar for 58 education researchers to explain how they can conduct their own randomized controlled experiments using the ASSISTments platform and its “subject pool” of 50,000. Some might cringe at the use of the word “subject pool” to describe a group of mostly middle school students, but Dr. Heffernan tries to remind the public that teachers are experimenting on millions everyday with their own new teaching ideas. WPI is doing so while simultaneously trying to collect the data necessary to monitor what is working. In all cases WPI is comparing normal instructional strategies (such as what types of hints are most effective at encouraging learning? Does a video work better than text?). The GK12 project helped ASSISTments get to the point where it could turn itself into a tool used by a community of education researchers to help the community learn what works.
We talk about OPEN data sets. ASSISTments promotes OPEN science by removing all personal identification information (student/teacher names, etc) from its data sets and sharing them with the world. At the Educational Data Mining Conferences, Dr. Heffernan was pleased to see scientific papers (two listed below) written by others that used his released data.
Tan, Ling, Sun, Xiaoxun, & Kho, Siek Toon (2014). Can Engagement be Compared? Measuring Academic Engagement for Comparison In Stamper, J., Pardos, Z., Mavrikis, M., McLaren, B.M. (eds.) Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Educational Data Mining. pp. 213-216.
Galyardt, A. & Goldin, I. (2014). Recent-Performance Factors Analysis. In Stamper, J., Pardos, Z., Mavrikis, M., McLaren, B.M. (eds.) Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Educational Data Mining. pp. 411-412 [pdf]
We talk about scientific publications. In ad...
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