Worcester Polytechnic Institute has been awarded an $8-million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Education Innovation and Research Program to expand an online learning tool developed by one of WPI’s professors.
This five-year grant, led by Neil Heffernan, professor of computer science and the director of the Learning Sciences and Technologies Program at WPI, will be used to scale up ASSISTments, a responsive online learning tool.
By receiving information about student academic performance, teachers using ASSISTments are able to target assignments to support the progress of their students. ASSISTments is used by 2,500 teachers across 46 states and in 14 countries; the team expects to expand ASSISTments to all 50 states by 2025.
The grant was received in partnership with The ASSISTments Foundation. ASSISTments was founded by Heffernan and his wife, Cristina Heffernan, a former math teacher. The organization conducts research on learning sciences and is focused on scaling the ASSISTments learning tool to teachers and students across the country.
