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.

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. 

What are Support Comparison Studies 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.

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.

Tutorials on Creating a Support Comparison Study

Link to Platform: https://etrials.assistments.org/ 

This Webinar for ASSISTments Teachers gives a deep dive into hints/explanations

We'd love for you to use our platform.