support Comparison Study

Introduction

What types of student supports (hints or explanations for math problems) work best for which students? Do you have multiple conditions of student supports you would like to compare? We invite you to conduct a Support Comparison Study to examine your research question. Your contribution will be invaluable to help students learn mathematics.

Who can participate

Researchers who are interested in creating two or more types of student supports (hint supports or explanations) that help students solve a particular problem, as conditions for a research study, are welcome to use our platform to conduct a Support Comparison Study.

Let Us Know You Are Interested

What is the study about

Many students struggle with math learning. ASSISTments-Teacher is a free formative math assessment platform that helps teachers be more responsive to students and makes instruction more relevant and customized. It has been used by more than 1 Million students. Teachers use the platform to assign students math problems from popular open educational resources such as Kendall Hunt Illustrative Mathematics and EngageNY/Eureka Math. ASSISTments is dedicated to helping students work independently on math problems by providing support in the form of hints and explanations.

Researchers will use the existing math problems in OER curriculums in our content library and create multiple conditions of student supports for math problems.
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.

Example studies include Hints vs. Explanations; Hints vs. Worked Examples; Hints vs. Dynamic Algebraic Notation System. The following video shows some examples.

Conceptual Framework

We use TPACK as our overall conceptual framework. You may use a specific conceptual framework for your comparison of different types of hints or explanations.

Adapted from the TPACK framework

The Process

Develop: After logging into the E-TRIALS platform, you will choose a problem set and then write hints or explanations for all conditions 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.

Benefits for Participation

$200 stipend for a researcher to set up a study and $800 to complete the first study for the first 50 researchers.
The team at ASSISTments will monitor for quality control.