What are the requirements for participating?

• Teach middle school math (grades 6, 7, or 8)
• Use EngageNY (Eureka Math), Open Up Resources (Illustrative Mathematics), and/or Utah Math as a curricular resource.
• Assign practice problems from these curricular resources at least 3 times a week in class or for homework.

ASSISTments is a free, research-based online platform that teachers use to assign and review homework. It does not replace a teacher’s curriculum; instead, each teacher’s desired content can be found or added to the system, regardless of LMS or textbook. ASSISTments is used nationally by more than 1,000 teachers and 50,000 students. In past research ASSISTments has been shown to be effective when used for homework. ASSISTments provides:

• Students with immediate feedback and the ability to try again before class the next day.
• Teachers with diagnostic reports for each assignment that show them which students struggled and which problems had the most wrong answers. They can use this information the following day to re-teach and to individualize student assignments.
• Optional skill builders to provide additional practice for students’ mathematics skills, aligned to students’ specific needs and the Common Core State Standards.
• The ability to assign homework through an LMS, such as Canvas or Google Classroom.

These videos compare the traditional homework review (on the left) with homework review supported by ASSISTments data (on the right) with students who have already been given feedback at home. In the ASSISTments enhanced review students are engaged within 30 seconds on a discussion about a common wrong answer on a difficult problem.

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.

ASSISTments tracks every action a student makes on each assignment. We plan to create messages that reflect those actions. Those messages will be suggested to the teacher who will choose which ones to send.

The same technology will be used to write comments in response to short answer replies by students.

CHANTELLE HOLMES ~ 7TH GRADE MATH TEACHER ~ BANGOR, ME

"ASSISTments has certainly changed the way I teach math compared to my first 20 years of teaching. Before using ASSISTments, I would start my classes the same as most teachers. I would have the students take out their work, we would go over the answers, and then I would ask which problems they would like to go over. Now, I am able to check each class’s report prior to the students' arrival. This allows me to know where the commonly missed errors were, as well as who struggled and who did not even complete the assignment. With increasing demands on me as a teacher and a more challenging curriculum, every minute is a precious commodity. ASSISTments has given me back several of those minutes and more! I have noticed that ASSISTments has also changed my instruction when the students are using ASSISTments to work on math practice in class. In the past, students would do the work and often would not even know they needed help. With the immediate feedback, the number of students raising hands asking for help or clarification has increased dramatically. They know immediately if they have it wrong and will try to fix it or will seek help when needed. I also use ASSISTments for Skill Builders to make sure my students are staying current with the basic skills they need. It helps me see which students need help and with which skills. I am able to assign these individually based on individual student need. Being able to create my own assignments has also been extremely helpful.

It seems every day I find another way to use ASSISTments to enhance my instruction and student learning."