June 11, 2007
WPI tutor program is money in the bank
By Matthew L. Brown
Potential for licensing, sale abounds
In the four years since Worcester Polytechnic Institute professor Neil T. Heffernan and professor Ken Koedinger of Carnegie Mellon University created the Assistment intelligent math tutor system, they've received $4 million in government grants.
But the earning potential of the innovative new system - which tutors students in math by helping them understand exactly what's being asked of them and why - has Heffernan equally excited.
Room in the budget
It's a system that could have broad appeal. Educational software and publishing companies would love to slap their names all over it once it's completed this fall. And school administrators are always on the lookout for products and methods that could help their districts achieve the federal No Child Left Behind Act's required "adequate yearly progress."
Those school systems would certainly find a way to budget for the Assistment system.
"There have been various business plans," Heffernan said at the Forest Grove Middle School in Worcester recently.
Students there, under the watchful eye of math department head Paul King, have been testing on Assistment from the beginning.
"We could license the technology to textbook publishers," Heffernan said. "We could patent it and license it to a spin-off business of the school."
What Heffernan would really like is "keeping it in-house, and actually collecting the money to provide the service," he said.
Proving technology
Heffernan said he would soon be able to prove that the Assistment program improves scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment (MCAS), which is taken by students in grades six through eight, and that's part of the reason the system has such appeal and potential.
The other part is that the system doesn't "teach to the test," as it were, and doesn't give teachers the feeling that they are being tested, of which the Measure of Academic Progress (MAP) test, also taken by middle school students, is often accused, Heffernan said.
Instead, Assistment actually helps students learn math, and helps teachers and parents keep track of how well or how poorly students are doing.
"Teachers just eat this up, but teachers aren't the ones making the purchasing decisions," Heffernan said.
Right now, every middle school in Worcester is using Assistment, Heffernan said, and so is the Oak Middle School in Shrewsbury.
With Assistment, students don't have to stop learning in order to take a standardized test.
Right from wrong
"Students shouldn't need to stop learning while they are taking a test, especially a practice test," Koedinger said. "Students keep learning while they are using the Assistment system, and we get just as good if not a better idea what they know and do not know than we can get from high-pressure, one-shot tests."That's because Assistment knows more than just right and wrong. It is built around more than 900 test items from the MCAS eighth-grade math test, all of which Heffernan has memorized, "This is problem 19 from 2003," he said, recognizing one particular geometry problem. Assistment also recognizes 98 different skills.
When a student gets a problem wrong, it lets the student know with a message like, "Sorry, that is incorrect. Let's move on and find out why."
It's what's called a "context sensitive error message," and it'll walk a student through a problem, allowing the student to hit a "hint" button. Hit the hint button a couple times without taking a crack at answering the problem, and the system will simply give the student the answer.
However, when that happens, Assistment reports the student's effort on the problem as low.
The system doesn't require students to master one topic before moving on to the next, but it keeps track of areas in which students need extra help. As students move through the curriculum, the system periodically circles back to provide additional instruction in the areas where students had difficulties.
The additional instruction can even include videos showing a teacher explaining how to solve a problem, and a web site showing examples.
The system tracks the number of hours students spend on the program, the percentage of problems they solved successfully, and even predicts their MCAS score; all of this can be seen by parents and teachers.
"The state can't possibly figure out what the kid did wrong, but we can," Heffernan said.
After so long in development, and now that 4,500 students and 60 math teachers in Worcester have used Assistment, Heffernan, an expert in artificial intelligence, said he and his team of cognitive psychologists, psychometricians and educational technology experts are nearly ready to send the program out to the wider world.
"We're hoping to be able to roll it out across the state, and let other people see it...in the fall," he said.
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