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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.

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