DRIVER-SEAT
Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Lesley University's Center for Mathematics Achievement are looking for 6th-8th grade math teachers for the development and piloting of an ASSISTments feedback system that will help teachers reply to their students more efficiently.
The goal of the DRIVER-SEAT project is to develop and implement a new feedback system that allows teachers to give individualized feedback to their students in an efficient and practical process.
ASSISTments DRIVER-SEAT will put teachers back in the driver's seat. Teachers who participate contribute to important, high-quality research that is sure to have national impact. They will also benefit by having improved homework routines.
What is DRIVER-SEAT?
DRIVER-SEAT, or the Dialogue Reinforcement Infrastructure for Volitional Exploratory Research - Soliciting Effective Actions from Teachers, will provide teachers with a quick and effective way to respond to student online homework. Similar to Google’s Smart Reply, which uses machine learning to let users send predictive or “suggested” human-like messages when responding to an email, DRIVER-SEAT will give teachers three suggested automated messages to respond to students’ math homework. The teacher can choose the most appropriate selection from the three choices to send to their student.
What the student will receive is a message that includes their teacher’s comment with some context showing what the teacher is referring to with their comment.
Teachers will help create our library by piloting a prototype system and selecting feedback to send their students. Library development will enable us to apply deep learning in an effort to discover how to help teachers efficiently reply to their students.
Why Participate?
ASSISTments is a free platform that will always be free. Prior research in Maine has demonstrated its effectiveness, and feedback from users confirm that the tool is helpful to both teachers and students. Educators who use EngageNY and Illustrative Mathematics will find content already uploaded to the ASSISTments system, ready for use!
Benefits and Eligibility
- Teachers must consistently use ASSISTments in their mathematics classroom.
- Teachers will spend an extra hour each day giving feedback to their students on ASSISTments and will be paid $35/hour to do this.
- Teachers will attend a 3-hour professional development workshop and will be paid $105 to attend this meeting.
For the current DRIVER-SEAT study, the project is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant Number 1822830.