Mainei3
From TeacherWiki
May 19, 2010
Welcome,
This page was to explain to districts what I am planning for a series of grants.
The first grant is now written and can be downloaded from here. Take a look, its very impressive to see all the districts and supporters we managed to get as listed in the Appendix.
I am planning to send a similar grant to the US Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences June 20th 2010, and then the same idea to the National Science Foundation's Math and Science Partnership grant program.
If you were not one of the districts that already gave us a letter of support, I will try to include you on the next grant that goes in. Contact me at NTH@WPI.edu and send in a letter of support.
We are doing doing two trainings for schools that your are welcome to sign up for while spaces last.
- June 3 Reserve your space at a training hosted at MSAD49
- June 4 Reserve your space at a training hosted at MSAD 6
Sincerely,
Neil Heffernan
P.S. If you are from a school system in Maine (Maine has a laptop program where each student gets to take a laptop home) there is a separate grant I am doing for Maine. Please visit the following page.
Information on the Investing in Innovation (i3) Grant Proposal by WPI
Professor Neil Heffernan is leading a group of school districts in Maine on an Investing in Innovation (i3) grant. If you want your district to get funding under this grant read more. If you are in a state other than Maine click here as this is the wrong page for you to be reading. Prof Heffernan is writing two different grants.
What is an Investing in Innovation (i3) grant?
Professor Heffernan is responding to a new grant line called Investing in Innovations or "i3." The Request for Proposals came out in March and is due May 11, 2010. The i3 grant program from the Federal DOE is described here [1]
Events: Learn more about this grant
Learn how to maximize your 1-1 Laptop program. Professor Heffernan is making several trips to Maine to get letters of support from districts. Please come to one of them.
What is ASSISTments and why is WPI leading this proposal?
ASSISTments is an online system developed to support schools who want to use current data to inform instruction. It is a blend of assessment and assistance. The system tutors students while assessing their understanding of grade-specific knowledge components. Teachers can get real-time reports on student performance. ASSISTments has modules for Mastery Learning (where ASSISTments provides the tedious bookkeeping functions), nightly homework (ASSISTments checks for accuracy and reports correct and incorrect feedback to teachers and students), parental notification of student performance, and more. The system collects and documents evidence of student learning, provides students with descriptive feedback to help them close gaps in understanding, and provides parents with specific information about what students know and understand.
Professor Heffernan developed ASSISTments at WPI with the help of a strong team of colleagues and graduate students. WPI is a leader in computer science providing a top notch education to a wide array of students including a large population of female students.
ASSISTments is funded by the US Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research. See our reference in the National Educational Technology Plan that just came out (http://www.ed.gov/technology/netp-2010/tech-supports-assessing-complex-competencies. Some of you might have heard about ASSISTments via a webinar attended by over 200 district personnel hosted by SERVE http://www.serve.org/Assessment-webinar.aspx
Watch this video to see ASSISTments in action.
What is the purpose of the WPI proposal lead by Heffernan?
The purpose of this grant proposal it to help schools in Maine give their nightly homework online via ASSISTments. Student will get immediate feedback, while teachers get detailed emails and reports. Teacher get to see which kids did their homework, what were the hardest questions, and what were the common misconceptions of students. This program will help students, teachers, school and districts learn to use data to improve learning.
Teachers and school leaders will receive funding to support professional development, coaching, and technical support in using data to improve student understanding through ASSISTments.
What exactly does this grant say?
Recently we wrote a grant for schools in Maine. To read it, click [2]. Please note on page 48 of the grant the letter of support from Susan Gendron, Commissioner of Education when this grant went in. Also note the endorsement from the past president of the NCTM, Mary Lindquist on page 39. This new i3 grant will look similar.
What will this grant offer to districts?
Each district will get support in doing formative assessment with ASSISTments. They will get funding for time for teachers to attend summer workshops and week end workshops learning how to do ASSISTments. The training will cover training on the basics on using ASSISTments and delve into how to use the data provided to make teaching more efficient and more effective.
Teachers will know, quickly and easily, which students know what, who has completed their homework (including checks for accuracy and reports correct and incorrect feedback to teachers and students), and what are common wrong answers. This will aid teachers planning their lessons to target the exact misconceptions students have. And the teacher decides what to assign when putting them in the drivers seat for data collection.
How much money are we talking about for a district?
We don't know yet but here is an estimate. It of course will depend upon how many math teaches you have at the middle school level (you can use ASSISTments with grades 4th through 10th but the grant will be focused on middle school math).
Each teacher will get training from a math coach. We plan to hire 9 math coaches to work across the state. We know that most schools in Maine are small but suppose your had 16 middle school math teachers. Your school might stand to get as much as $300,000 in support spread out over 3 years. About half of that support will be in the form of a math coach. The other half will be to fund each teacher at $35 an hour for up to 120 hours a year. That 120 hours may be spread out between summer workshops, weekly meeting in professional learning communities, and a few weekend workshops.
Schools will be asked to submit a budget year to WPI on how they want to spend their funds and to schedule their hours. This will allow for schools to make this training a part of what they are already doing, not an add on.
What does your district needs to do to participate?
To participate, Professor Heffernan needs a letter of support from your district.
You may download a draft letter here and fill it in with information from your district. Please put it on your district letterhead.
Some essentials that must be included in the letter:
- Your district commits doing this
- Mention that you let students take their laptops home with them. This is key to doing homework online.
- Your district commits adhering to the requirements of the grant about participating in evaluation. The US Dept of Education requires a serious evaluation of this grant and will have an outside evaluator who will conduct a study to see if student learning happens. This will likely involve a randomized controlled trial where half the schools will not get the intervention until Year 2, although all school will eventually get the intervention.
- Your district commits to sustaining this effort after the grant is over. The rules of getting a grant are such that they want to make sure the district has a plan to sustain this grant so it does not die after the 5 years are up. How will your district sustain it? During the course of the grant, you will have a lead teacher in each school who will get extra training in being a math coach and knows how to use ASSISTments very well. After the grant is over that person will then help train new folks in your district.
Your letter needs to fit on one page with type font no smaller than a 10 point font.
Letters that don't included all the elements in the draft letter will be dropped before we submit the proposal. To be clear, it is key to include language that your school knows that the US Department of Education demands a serious evaluation. We are not sure how many districts we will accept and will let you know by May 10, 2010, if you district made the final cut.
When will you know if you will get funding?
The grants will be reviewed this summer and the US Department of Education says they hope to make awards by September. We don't know how long after that it will take for funds to start flowing to districts.
Who is Professor Neil Heffernan?
Neil is a professor at WPI in the Computer Science Department. He graduated Amherst College in Massachusetts and became a math teacher through Teach For America. After realizing just what a challenging job this was, he wanted to do something easier and got a PhD in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania. Since coming to Worcester, Massachusetts, Neil has been developing ASSISTments and working with local school districts.
Here is a short bio [3]. Neil Heffernan is the most successful grant writer at WPI having received $9 million in the last 7 years.
Who else is involved with this grant?
- Neil Heffernan is a professor at WPI who created ASSISTments and directs the project.
- Cristina Heffernan is a former math teacher at WPI is the math education specialist on the project and teacher trainer.
- Matthew Militello is a former principal who is a professor at North Carolina State and will work with principals involved in the implementation of ASSISTments.
- Ken Koedinger is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University will be a lead cognitive scientist on this grant. Koedigner is the current co-director of a $25 million NSF grant called "Pittsburgh Science of Learning." He and Neil Heffernan created ASSISTments.
- Louis Gomez is Dean of the School of Education at the University of Pittsburgh, will help us work with school, to school based research to understand the factors of when this intervention seems to be effective.
- Nina Arshavsky is an expert in training teachers and coaches and will help train the coaches in this project.
- John Pane is our outside evaluator.
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What is the research behind ASSISTments? Does ASSISTments really improve student test scores?
We have some promising results that ASSISTments is effective but have not yet been funded to do a large scale experiment to see if schools that are giving ASSISTments have high gains in test scores. This grant will allow us to do that.
John Pane at RAND will be the outside evaluator that will conduct the study to see if students test scores go up. RAND is the nation’s foremost name in trusted evaluation. Dr. John Pane has already run several multiple million-dollar evaluations of educational technology products. He is unbiased; one of his multi-million dollar studies showed that the education technology product actually reduced test scores. When this grant is over, we will know if ASSISTments can increase student test scores.
- We have already shown that student learn more homework if they do it online with ASSISTments giving tutoring as they go as opposed to the control condition representing business as usual where student get feedback the next day in math class.
- Mendicino, M., Razzaq, L. & Heffernan, N. T. (2009) Comparison of Traditional Homework with Computer Supported Homework: Improving Learning from Homework Using Intelligent Tutoring Systems. Journal of Research on Technology in Education (JRTE). Published by the International Society For Technology in Education (ISTE).
- We showed the same effect in classrooms. Most math classes have teachers presenting a lesson and then there is a time for practice independently with a teacher circulating to help kids before they have to go home and do it alone. Student learned more if they got immediate feedback from the computer, compared to a control condition representing what normally happens.
- Razzaq, L., Mendicino, M. & Heffernan, N. (2008) Comparing classroom problem-solving with no feedback to web-based homework assistance. In Woolf, Aimeur, Nkambou and Lajoie (Eds.) Proceeding of the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems. pp. 426 - 437. Springer-Verlag: Berlin.
- We have shown in the following paper that usage over the course of a year leads to higher test scores than a control group.
- Koedinger, K. R., McLaughlin, E. A., Heffernan, N. T. (2010). A Quasi-Experimental Evaluation of anOn-line Formative Assessment and Tutoring System. Journal of Educational Computing Research, (accepted but not final version).
- More at Publications
How is ASSISTments used by teachers in real classrooms?
- Here is a book chapter prepared by Neil Heffernan for a book Chris Dede at Harvard is editing. It is expected to be published in the fall of 2010 by Havard or Columbia's Teacher Press. Book Chapter
- Here is an article on our vision how ASSISTments could be used to kick start a Professional Learning Community. Article.
- Here is an article written for principals and superintendents. Article
- If you are looking for documentation on how to use ASSISTments you can read this user manual. User manual and Information for getting started.
Click Here for a power-point poster of how ASSISTments is use for formative Assessment.
Is ASSISTments aligned with NECAP and the new common core?
- Yes, we are aligned. In fact, teachers can get reports in the language of NECAP standards. Click here to see out our knowledge components are linked to NECAP standards.
- We can do this because we tag all of our problems with our 135 4th - 8th grade skills. Here is a large graph containing all of the skill, as well as recursive prerequisite trees and pages organizing the skills by grade level and strand.
