Terms Of Use

Familiarize yourself with Worcester Polytechnic Institute's Institutional Review Board (IRB) approved documents that govern the use of ASSISTments for running randomized controlled trials and analyzing anonymized student data. In addition to WPI's IRB forms that must be signed, we require - in the very least - an IRB exemption from your university or institute. We cannot Deploy your study using Auto-Deploy or ASSISTed-Deploy approaches until we receive a letter of approval from your IRB. We suggest providing your IRB with a signed copy of WPI's IRB and evidence of signed Terms of Use.

Per WPI's IRB, we require that all interventions that constitute a modification to ASSISTments content and to be delivered to ASSISTments teacher and student users fall within the boundaries of normal instructional practice for K-12 mathematics. You do not need to get your university or institution's IRB to provide the same level of approval. Please see our IRB page for additional information.

Develop your study with well-thought out research questions and robust content. Your study can qualify as "normal instructional practice," and pass approval of both WPI's IRB and your IRB, but our E-TRIALS team still needs to assess the content of your work before it can be Deployed to teacher and student users of ASSISTments. Professor Heffernan has described the type of minimally disruptive research we support in E-TRIALS.

With regard to data resulting from the use of E-TRIALS, researchers are provided anonymized data with student, class, and school level variables. It may be possible to use third party information to associate the anonymized data provided by E-TRIALS with individual students or teachers despite our team's best efforts to protect their identities. Student records are protected by FERPA. By using E-TRIALS or the data it provides, you are agreeing to the following terms and conditions:

  • You will make any and all outcomes of your research available to the public using free and open access practices - we require you to create an OSF project page to access your data.

  • You will cite ASSISTments and the specific dataset of interest (using the dataset’s DOI, if available, from the OSF) in any public release of your work, as well as up to one paper listed on the dataset’s website, if applicable.

  • You will not use or reference ASSISTments data for any commercial purpose.

  • You agree not to use the data in any other malicious manner.

  • You will not make any attempts to de-anonymize ASSISTments data. You will not attempt to identify ASSISTments users directly, or to modify or create any supplemental or third party datasets that identify ASSISTments users. If you are able to identify ASSISTments users in this or any ASSISTments dataset, you will: a) email etrials@assistments.org with a copy of the dataset, any supplemental files, and a written explanation of how the data was de-anonymized, b) delete all de-anonymized data and related outcomes, and c) halt pursuit of or redact publication of any outcome that risks identifying and/or harming ASSISTments users.

  • Worcester Polytechnic Institute and The ASSISTments Foundation follow open science practices for data accessibility and archiving but make no guarantees about the quality or permanence of ASSISTments data.

  • In using an ASSISTments dataset you agree to indemnify and hold harmless Worcester Polytechnic Institute and The ASSISTments Foundation of and from any and all claims, demands, losses, causes of action, damage, lawsuits, judgments, including attorneys' fees and costs, arising out of or relating to your use and analysis of ASSISTments data.

  • Did you remember to link back to our ALI report? To comply with the terms of use, part 3: "I will acknowledge the use of the ASSISTments TestBed in any publications; ASSISTments will acknowledge my role when my data, etc. is made available to the public." We suggest you use this acknowledgement: "We thank the ASSISTments Foundation and WPI for hosting the www.etrialstestbed.org that made this study possible. If you want more information about the ASSISTments platforms, we suggest Heffernan, N.T. & Heffernan, C.L. (2014); for more about E-TRIALS, we suggest Ostrow, K., Heffernan, N.T., & Williams, J.J. (2017)."



Small technical note: If you try to rerun your study and you see a broken video here is the answer. Videos that were made before Jan 21st 2017, and that were listed as "unlisted" link in Youtube, were changed to "Private" on July 23, 2021.


In order for us to provide you with data from your study, you and any co-authors who will work with the data must first agree to these Terms of Use. Once we receive agreements to from each party (currently, separate written agreements via emails from each person are sufficient), our team will assess your data request.