Can I test a commercial product?

The answer is yes, but if you have a conflict of interest with the product then you should negotiate a fee with WPI.

However, if you have no conflict of interest with the company (i.e., you make money depending upon how the study comes out) and are trying to evaluate an existing product, we want you to be able to use ASSISTments TestBed to conduct your research and advance science. We believe it is important to support researchers who are conducting studies to independently test the effectiveness of commercially available products

Here is an example. DragonBox was making strong claims about how much learning their commercial product produced.

Long & Aleven’s 2014 study tested those claims that the company was making. They showed that the claims the company was making seemed to be exaggerated.

We want to make it easy for you to do studies like this.