Common Answer FEEDBACK Study

Introduction

What types of feedback work best for students who attempt a specific correct or incorrect answer? Common Answers are the most popular responses students in ASSISTments have chosen for a given problem. Researchers who are interested in creating two types of feedback that help students solve problems are welcome to use our platform to conduct a Common Answer Feedback Study. 

What are Common Answer Feedback Studies About?

• Many students struggle with math learning. ASSISTments is a free online math learning platform supporting millions of students. Teachers use the platform to assign students math problems from popular open educational resources such as Kendall Hunt Illustrative Mathematics. ASSISTments is dedicated to helping students work independently on math problems by providing support in the form of hints, explanations, and feedback.   

• Researchers will use the existing math problems in OER curriculums in our content library.

• For each math problem in an assignment (with the exception of open-response questions), researchers will review the 10 most common answers to the problem and create one or two conditions of feedback messages. Researchers may choose to create feedback messages for any number of the 10 most common answers. One of the 10 most common responses will be the correct answer, while the others will be incorrect responses.

• Studies will be auto-deployed and no recruitment is required. Students will be randomly assigned into one of the conditions. 

• In addition to student learning data, clickstream data will be retrieved by the system and provided to the researcher for analysis. 

Conceptual Framework

The Process

• Develop: After logging into the E-TRIALS platform, you will choose a problem set and then write common answer feedback messages for the treatment condition(s) of your study. 

• Deploy: Your study will be auto deployed. No recruitment required. Data comes in after students do the math problems with your hints or explanations. After your study is deployed, we will send you a brief survey on your demographics and feedback for our platform.

• Disseminate: Please keep us updated with the dissemination status of your study by emailing etrials@assistments.org.

The Platform for Writing Feedback Messages

If you have any questions, please contact us at etrials@assistments.org.