Skip to main content

ASSISTments: Mastery Learning in an Intelligent Tutoring System


The ASSISTment is a cognitive computer tutoring and reporting system targeted towards middle school math students under development in WPI's A.I. Lab with sponsorship from the US Department of Education. A new system was implemented in ASSISTments allowing questions of a particular type to be procedurally generated from a single question of that same type allowing the artificial tutor to utilize mastery learning in its pedagogy. Studies of the real-world impact of mastery learning in the ASSISTment system were conducted across middle schools in Massachusetts under controlled conditions. The resulting data did not show significant indicators that mastery learning in the ASSISTment is effective. However, case studies of certain test subjects suggest that mastery learning could be effective for certain kinds of students, specifically the low achieving ones, indicating that further work needs to be done on only these types of students.

This is just the abstract of a 2009 research paper authored by me, Billy Zhong and Christopher Gamache and advised by Prof. Neil Heffernan. Download the full paper here.

Comments

  1. Emma JasmineMay 25, 2019 at 12:21 AM

    hi

    ReplyDelete
  2. Emma JasmineMay 30, 2019 at 11:26 PM

    Great post regarding school education. Ask questions about school or college education from qanda team which can provide valuable advice to both teachers and students.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Don Taylor's Creon in 'Antigone'

Who is the protagonist in Sophocles’ Antigone ? Is it Antigone or Creon? Scholars in literature often debate that question. But in Don Taylor’s 1984 rendition of Antigone , there is no doubt that Creon (played by John Shrapnel) is the protagonist. Don Taylor’s direction to have a Creon-focused Antigone was a precarious decision, but a highly successful one. You have to see it to believe it. The story of Antigone (played by Juliet Stevenson) is about the recalcitrant title character who buried her dead brother thereby violating a decree set forth by her uncle, the new king Creon. She did it to uphold a religious right she believed to be ubiquitous, but Creon viewed it as an act against his power and therefore refused to grant her impunity from death. Even the fact that she was his niece and future daughter-in-law could not have saved her nor did she want to be saved, at least not through family ties. After all, Antigone's iconoclastic action, her brother’s burial, was also ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Ontology of Virtual Reality

In 2012 the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality (VR) headset display, made headlines in the technology world when it raised US$2.5 million through crowdfunding. In 2014 it was acquired by Facebook for a whopping US$2 billion. Ever since then leaders in technology have been pouring money in VR research & development and there is no shortage of creative studios producing VR content. Although VR have not reached universal adoption, the data looks to be auspicious. In 2010, just 2 years prior to VR's supposed harbinger, I wrote a chapter in my Sufficiency in the Philosophy of Technology under Prof. John Sanbonmatsu titled 'The Ontology of Virtual Reality'. Rereading it, I think it is still relevant today. Here it is: There are two aspects of virtual reality that pertains to human use: information and communication (Valentine and Holloway n.d.). Virtual reality is a space filled with information provided by its architects. Perhaps the easiest example to grasp is the internet...
4 comments
Read more