May2011
From TeacherWiki
Introduction
The National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP), in cooperation with Worcester Polytechnic Institute, is inviting schools and districts in Maine to express interest in a grant-funded project that would give your school(s), free of charge, access and support in using ASSISTments.
This web page is designed to help you learn about that tool, called ASSISTments, and what you have to do so, if we get funding, your school can benefit.
- Scroll to the bottom of this page for directions on what you can do to offer support and be a part of this grant. Click on the Mailbox for a sample letter.
The Purpose of the Grant is Support for Smarter Nightly Homework
Cogntive Science tells us that immediate feedback while students practice is a powerful component of increasing student learning. WPI has done multiple week-long studies that show if students use ASSISTments for support on their homework, they will learn a half a letter grade more than students in traditional homework situations. Students get immediate feedback as they do their homework that help learning. What is needed now is year-long studies to see if such results can be replicated and to lead to gains on a state test (in this case NECAP). ASSISTments is engineered to work on Maine student and teacher laptops even when a student looses his connection to the internet.
We are asking funders for support for the professional development of teachers to test if ASSISTments causes higher NECAP scores. Teachers get reports at 6 AM telling them who did not do their homework and what problems are worth going over. These reports can make the use of class time more efficient.
This idea is easy for schools to implement as we are not asking school to change their curriculum. This project will just help schools do smarter homework: for instance, ASSISTments can be used to give student just the right amount of practice for a given topic and no more so they use their time efficiently. This project will help your teachers use homework more effectivly, without trying to massivlely change the way they teach. ASSISTments also has reports for school principals so you can monitor the your school's use and hear from teachers about what they are doing.
Who are some of the partners on these grants?
We are going after multiple grants. One is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Next Generation Learning Challenge. NAESP along with Worcester Polytechnic Institute , Edutopia™ and the Connecting Education, Leadership and Technology (CELT) Corporation are finalists for this grant to expand the use of ASSISTments. The University of Maine's Center For Research and Evaluation is one of the groups that we have partnered with to do an evaluation of our program. Another is for the Department of Education.
What is ASSISTments?
Here are a few links you can use to learn about ASSISTments.
- Overview: About ASSISTments will give you a introduction to ASSISTments.
- Listen to teachers talk about how they use ASSISTments at a the January 14, 2011, meeting of the Association of Teachers of Mathematics in Massachusetts.
- Video: Watch a video showing what ASSISTments looks like.
- Press : Here is a Boston Globe article on the back story behind ASSISTments featuring Neil Heffernan explaining why he keeps ASSISTments free.
- Maine Letters of Support: See letters of support from Maine's Commissioners office, the chief of math, chief of the laptop project, and other folks in Maine, including letters of support from 12 districts.
- To see some of the textbooks we already have in the system click here. As part of these grants, we will take the commonly used textbooks in Maine and put the answers into ASSISTments, so your school can do what they already do for homework and will have the benefits of immediate feedback.
- Listen to School Officials Talk about ASSISTments: This page has a video of teachers and principals explaining to Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville how they use ASSISTments.
- Research: Research results that show ASSISTments works to produce greater student achievement.
- Further Information: More information is available at our main teacher site.
What will this grant offer districts?
Your school will benefit from:
- Unlimited Access to the Online Formative Assessment/Assistance System by students, parents, teachers, and instructional leaders (ASSISTments is free and will continue to be free after the grant period).
- The ASSISTments Institute Train-the-Trainer Program. You will send a staff member to be trained so they can train the rest of the school's staff. For an example of that training go to the page about our training we are doing in Bangor. That person you designate to get training will have access to ongoing video conference meetings with Cristina Heffernan at WPI who does the teacher training. They will be able to talk to the developers of ASSISTments who can give assistance in learning the system, and support in training their own staff.
- Money for your teachers to be paid for time they spend outside the normal school hours working on this project.
What are you committing to by sending in a letter of commitment?
We need to show our funders that we have support in Maine. Your letter helps show that support. They will not support us unless we can show that reasonable number of schools are potentially interested.
The letter is not binding but it does put you first in line for funding from the grant. If the grant is funded we will reach out to those schools who wrote letters first. If we are funded we will ask you to attend a meeting to here about how much funding we actually got, and at that time we will ask you for a real commitment to the project. So if this project sounds like something you might want to participate in, then you should send in a letter.
- Letters are due June 15, 2011.
Experiment Desing to see if ASSISTments Works
Our funders want us to determine if ASSISTments leads to higher NECAP scores; therefore, schools that express interest will all get to participate but some will be randomly assigned to the "no ASSISTments" condition and will have to wait two years before they get access to the program. This allows our funders to see if giving ASSISTments to school genuinely effects learning.
Send us a letter of support
Submit this letter of interest, on your school's stationary, to Neil Heffernan, Director of ASSISTments via email at nth@wpi.edu. If you have questions you can email or call Professor Heffernan at 508-831-5569. Please send in letters by June 15, 2011.
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When do we find out if our school is selected to participate?
For the Gates grant we were told to expect to be informed by June 13, 2011. For the US Department of Education and the NSF, we expect to be notified near December.
