How Can Platforms Like ASSISTments Be Used to Improve Research?

摘要

The head of the Institute of Education Sciences is asking about how to use platform to increase education sciences. We have been addressing this. So how do you use platforms like EdX, Khan Academy, Canvas to improve science? There is a crisis in American Science referred to as the Reproducibility Crisis where many experimental results are not able to be reproduced. We are trying to address this crisis by helping "good science" to be done. People that control platforms have a responsibility to try to make them useful tools for learning what works. In Silicon Valley, every company is doing AB Testing to refine their individual products. That, in and of itself, is a good thing and we should use these platforms to figure out how to make them more effective. One of the ways we should do that is by experimenting with different ways of helping students succeed. ASSISTments, a platform I have created, with 50,000 middle-school math students, is used to help scientists run studies. I will explain how we have over 100 experiments running inside the ASSISTments platform and how the ASSISTment-sTestBed.org allows external researchers to propose studies. I will also explain how proper oversight is done by our Institutional Review Board. Further, I will explain how users of this platform agree ahead of time to Open-Science procedures such as open-data, open-materials, and pre-registration. I'll illustrate some examples with the 24 randomized controlled trials that I have published as well as the three studies that have more recently come out from the platform by others. Finally, I will point to how we are anonymizing our data and how over 34 different external researchers have used our datasets to publish scientific studies. I would like to thank the U.S. Department of Education and the National Science Foundation for their support of over $32 million from 40+ grants. 1 will also address how COVID-19 has driven a ten-fold increase in the number of teachers creating new ASSISTments accounts, and 1 will give my own personal take on how COVID-19 highlights the need to keep teachers in the loop so that their students know their teachers are paying attention to their work and what it means for the AIED community.