Gates Foundation NGLC Report

When ASSISTments was given a $500,000 grants from the Gates Foundation, they used SRI as an outside evaluator to study the effectiveness of the 17 different products that the Gates Foundation Funded. For an assessment tool, SRI choose to use the NWEA's computer-adaptive test called Measures of Academic Progresses(MAPs). One of the nice things about MAPs is thousands of schools a year are using this test at least twice a year. So all students will take the test at the beginning of the year and then again at the end of the years. (Since there are 17,000 question in the question bank, and its computer adaptive, the test is never the same questions). This enables a growth score to be computed for each child that takes into account where they started the year. The Schools that adopted ASSISTments has a reliable improvement in their growth scores of .03 standards deviations. To translate that into more meaningful terms, we note the average growth on MAPs at seventh grade is about .3 standards deviations so that is about a 10% improvement in learning.

Miller, G. I, Zheng, Y., Means, B. & Van Brunt, J. (2013). Next Generation Learning Challenges Wave II Final Evaluation Report. SRI Project Report # P20778. Paid for by the Gates Foundation. Retrieved on May 20, 2014, from https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2X0QD6q79ZJUl9Kd2JuVTN0VWhTYVRhX254QV85Njdqc1Vj/edit?usp=sharing

(See Table 3, listing WPI at the bottom showing a effect size of .036.)