User:Nth

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Dr. Neil Heffernan graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College in History and Computer Science. Neil taught mathematics to eighth grade students in Baltimore City as part of Teach for America, a program that selectively recruits top candidates to teach in inner-city schools. Neil then decided to do something easier and get a PhD in building intelligent tutoring systems. Neil enrolled in Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Science Department to do multi-disciplinary research in cognitive science and computer science to create educational software that leads to higher student achievement. For his dissertation, Neil built the first intelligent tutoring system that incorporated a model of tutorial dialog. This system has been shown to lead to higher student learning, by getting students to think more deeply about problems. It is based upon detailed studies of students, which produced basic cognitive science research results on the nature of human thinking and learning. The system, which can be accessed for free at www.AlgebraTutor.org, is the most widely used web-based intelligent tutoring system. Thousands of students have logged on to practice their skills in mathematics and the system has received numerous educational awards. This technology was patented and licensed to Carnegie Learning Inc. which has sold tutors to 1,000+ high schools across the US. As a post-doc, Neil managed a team of four programmers and PhDs to create authoring tools to make it easier to build intelligent tutoring systems. The first version of these tools was successfully used in the “CIRCLE 2002 Summer Schools for Building Intelligent Tutoring Systems” where researchers from around the world learned how to build intelligent tutoring systems. Neil continues to teach at this annual event as part of his efforts to disseminate intelligent tutoring research and technology. Neil was awarded a National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Research Fellow funded by the Spencer Foundation. Neil is now an assistant professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he is focused on creating "cognitive models", computer simulations of student thinking and learning, which are then used to design educational materials, practices and technologies. Neil and his colleagues are working in close collaboration with the Worcester Public Schools, teams of teachers and WPI graduate students to create the next generation of intelligent tutoring systems. Neil’s current system is used by 3,000+ middle school student as part of their normal math class. Since coming to WPI, Neil has received 13 grants (to the NSF CAREER and other NSF programs, the US Dept of Education(2), the Office of Naval Research(3), the US Army(2), and the Spencer Foundation) worth over 8 millions dollars. His most recent grant is to apply his technologies to tutoring scientific inquiry.