by Sarah Hampton

In my last post, I discussed the ways AI can enhance formative assessment. In this post, let’s take a look at the AI example I’m most excited about and how it’s already benefited 11,000 teachers!

ASSISTments seems both practical and forward thinking, a unique combination. Sometimes it can be frustrating getting excited about new technologies when they’re still in development and not yet ready for the classroom. But, unlike many cutting edge projects I read about, ASSISTments is ready to implement now.

In their own words, “ASSISTments is more than an assessment tool. It improves the learning journey, translating student assessment to skill building and mastery, guiding students with immediate feedback, and giving teachers the time and data insights to drive every step of their lesson in a meaningful way.”

ASSISTments works through a 4 step process to help you get started:

1. Create assignments.
   Teachers select questions from existing or custom question banks. I was really impressed with the number and variety of sets already on the site. There are question sets from select open educational resources, textbook curricula, and released state tests ready to be assigned. There are also pre-made general skill-building and problem-solving sets. Note, everything the students see is assigned by you, the teacher.
2. Assist students through immediate feedback.
   As students complete their assigned problems, they might receive hints and explanations to help them understand. Check out these screenshots of the platform. (See more in The ASSISTments Ecosystem: Building a Platform that Brings Scientists and Teachers Together for Minimally Invasive Research on Human Learning and Teaching)



Figure: An ASSISTments message shown just before the student hits the “done” button, showing two different hints and one buggy message that can occur at different points.

Students immediately know if they’re right or wrong and can answer multiple times for partial credit, and, at the end of each assignment, each student receives an outcome report detailing their performance.

3. Assess class performance.
   Data is also available to the teacher. Check out how easy they make it for teachers to gauge student progress.



Figure. An easy way to visualize student performance.



Figure. A popular ASSISTments report organizes student homework results in a grid–with tasks in columns and students in rows and enables teachers to quickly identify which problems to review and what the common errors were, as indicated by the annotations.

4. Analyze answers together (with your students).
   After teachers see which problems were routinely missed, class time can be spent on the most needed concepts. As the ASSISTments site says, “Homework and classwork flow seamlessly into instruction of new material.” You can use the information you gain from the reports to determine what you will cover the next day. If everyone gets a concept you can move on and not waste valuable class time covering material that is understood. ASSISTments can also help support groups or personalized work.

This four-step process models what needs to happen in effective formative assessment, which was discussed in the second post of this series. Students engage in an assessment for learning (in this case it’s their homework), receive specific, supportive, timely, and focused feedback on how to close the gap between their current and desired understanding, and the results of the assessment are used to drive the next learning encounter.

Based on the undergirding principles of formative assessment, it’s no surprise that ASSISTments meets the rigorous What Works Clearinghouse standards without reservation, and receives a strong rating as an evidence-based PK-12 program by Evidence for ESSA. Based on a randomized controlled trial examining 2,728 seventh grade students in Maine, on average, the use of ASSISTments “produced a positive impact on students’ mathematics achievement at the end of a school year” equivalent to a student at the 50th percentile without the intervention improving to the 58th percentile with it. In addition, as seen in other formative assessment studies, the largest gains were seen by students with low prior achievement. (Online Mathematics Homework Increases Student Achievement) ASSISTments helps you by helping the students who need it the most and seems to allow you to be in multiple places at once!

One of the reasons I’m so excited about this program is because it was thoughtfully designed with teachers and students in mind. Neil and Cristina Heffernen, the co-creators of ASSISTments, write this in The ASSISTments Ecosystem: Building a Platform that Brings Scientists and Teachers Together for Minimally Invasive Research on Human Learning and Teaching.

“In many ways the list of problem sets in ASSISTments is a replacement for the assignment from the textbook or the traditional worksheet with questions on it. This way the teachers do not have to make a drastic change to their curriculum in order to start using the system. But more importantly they can make more sense of the data they get back since they are the ones who selected and assigned the problems.This is in contrast to the idea of an artificial intelligence automatically deciding what problem is best for each student. While this is a neat idea, it takes the teacher out of the loop and makes the computer tutorial less relevant to what is going on in the classroom.”

Exactly! I want formative assessment–in and out of the classroom–to meaningfully guide my instruction. Furthermore, I really appreciate that ASSISTments was designed to give teachers assistance in the workflow, to inform them about what students are learning, and, more importantly, not learning, so that teachers can make an informed decision on how to best help their students. I hope including teachers in the design process and helping teachers work more effectively with their students becomes a standard for educational AIs.

You need a school verified Google Classroom or paid Canvas account to use it, but ASSISTments itself is free! Unfortunately, our school uses a basic Canvas account, but customer service at ASSISTments allowed me to have a teacher role using a personal account so I could fully explore the program. I’m hopeful that this can be a transformative homework solution for math students! I think it will be worth your time to see what ASSISTments can offer you.

Note, I am not affiliated with ASSISTments and was not paid or asked to write about ASSISTments. I learned about it from CIRCL, and I was intrigued because I teach mathematics, but everything I discovered about it was through my research and my excitement about its potential is my own.

Watch this short video to learn more about ASSISTments, and read more about co-creator Neil Heffernen in his CIRCL Perspective.

Thank you to ASSISTments’ co-creator Cristina Hefferenen and to James Lester for reviewing this post. We appreciate your work in AI and your work to bring educators and researchers together on this topic.

by Sarah Hampton

In my last post, I talked about effective formative assessments and their powerful impact on student learning. In this post, let’s explore why AI is well-suited for formative assessment.

1. AI can offer individualized feedback on specific content.
2. AI can offer individualized feedback that helps students learn how to learn.
3. AI can provide meaningful formative assessment outside of school.
4. AI might be able to assess complex and messy knowledge domains.

Individualized Feedback on Content Learning

I think individualized feedback is the most powerful advantage of AI for assessment. As a teacher, I can only be in one place at a time looking in one direction at a time. That means I have two choices for feedback: I can take some time to assess how each student is doing and then address general learning barriers as a class, or I can assess and give feedback to students one at a time. In contrast, AI allows for simultaneous individualized feedback for each student.

“AI applications can identify pedagogical materials and approaches adapted to the level of individual students, and make predictions, recommendations and decisions about the next steps of the learning process based on data from individual students. AI systems assist learners to master the subject at their own pace and provide teachers with suggestions on how to help them.” (Trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI) in education: promises and challenges)

Going one step further, AI has the ability to assess students without disrupting their learning by something called stealth assessment. While students work, AI can quietly collect data in the background such as the time it takes to answer questions, which incorrect strategies they tried before succeeding, etc. and organize them into a dashboard so teachers can use that data to inform what to focus on or clear up the next day in class. Note: As a teacher, I want the AI to help me do what I do best. I definitely want to see what each student needs in their learning. Also, as a teacher, I want to be able to control when the AI should alert me about intervening (as a caring human) instead of it trying to do something on its own that it isn’t capable of doing well.

Feedback That Helps Students Learn How to Learn

“Two experimental research studies have shown that students who understand the learning objectives and assessment criteria and have opportunities to reflect on their work show greater improvement than those who do not (Fontana & Fernandes, 1994; Frederikson & White, 1997).” (The Concept of Formative Assessment)

In the last post, I noted that including students in the process of self-assessment is critical to effective formative assessment. After all, we ultimately want students to be able to self-regulate their own learning. But, as one teacher, it can sometimes be difficult to remind students individually to stop and reflect on their work and brainstorm ways to close the gap between their current understanding and their learning goal. By contrast, regulation prompts can be built into AI software so students routinely stop and check for understanding and defend their reasoning, giving students a start on learning how to self-regulate.

For example, this is done in Crystal Island, an AI game-based platform for learning middle school microbiology, “students were periodically prompted to reflect on what they had learned thus far and what they planned to do moving forward…Students received several prompts for reflection during the game. After completing the game or running out of time, students were asked to reflect on their problem-solving experience as a whole, explaining how they approached the problem and whether they would do anything differently if they were asked to solve a similar problem in the future.” (Automated Analysis of Middle School Students’ Written Reflections During Game-Based Learning)

      In-game reflection prompt presented to students in Crystal Island

Meaningful Formative Assessment Outside of School

Formative assessment and feedback can come from many sources, but, traditionally, the main source is the teacher. Students only have access to their teacher inside the classroom and during class time. In contrast, AI software can provide meaningful formative assessment anytime and anywhere which means learning can occur anytime and anywhere, too.

In the next post, we’ll look at how one AI tool, ASSISTments, is using formative assessment to transform math homework by giving meaningful individualized feedback at home.

Assessing Complexity and Messiness

In the first post of the series, I discussed the need for assessments that can measure the beautiful complexity of what my students know. I particularly like the way Griffin, McGaw, and Care state it in Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills:

“Traditional assessment methods typically fail to measure the high-level skills, knowledge, attitudes, and characteristics of self-directed and collaborative learning that are increasingly important for our global economy and fast-changing world. These skills are difficult to characterize and measure but critically important, more than ever. Traditional assessments are typically delivered via paper and pencil and are designed to be administered quickly and scored easily. In this way, they are tuned around what is easy to measure, rather than what is important to measure.”

We have to have assessments that can measure what is important and not just what is easy. AI has the potential to help with that.

For example, I can learn more about how much my students truly understand about a topic from reading a written response than a multiple choice response. However, it’s not possible to frequently assess students this way because of the time it takes to read and give feedback on each essay. (Consider some secondary teachers who see 150+ students a day!)

Fortunately, one major area for AI advancement has been in natural language processing. AIs designed to evaluate written and verbal ideas are quickly becoming more sophisticated and useful for providing helpful feedback to students. That means that my students could soon have access to a more thorough way to show what they know on a regular basis and receive more targeted feedback to better their understanding.

While the purpose of this post is to communicate the possible benefits of AI in education, it’s important to note that my excitement about these possibilities is not a carte blanche endorsement for them. Like all tools, AI has the potential to be used in beneficial or nefarious ways. There is a lot to consider as we think about AI and we’re just starting the conversation.

As AI advances and widespread classroom implementation becomes increasingly more possible, it’s time to seriously listen to those at the intersection of the learning sciences and artificial intelligence like Rose Luckin. “Socially, we need to engage teachers, learners, parents and other education stakeholders to work with scientists and policymakers to develop the ethical framework within which AI assessment can thrive and bring benefit.” (Towards artificial intelligence-based assessment systems)

Thank you to James Lester for reviewing this post. We appreciate your work in AI and your work to bring educators and researchers together on this topic.

We are still at the beginning of our conversation around AI in Education. What do you think? Do the possible benefits excite you? Do the possible risks concern you? Both? Let us know @CIRCLEducators.